Last night, I went to the last wedding in my 6 month wedding season of 2011. We were invited to 8 weddings this year, and were able to attend 6 of them...plus we had our own, so you can say 2011 was definitely the Year of the Wedding! Each wedding was gorgeous in its own right, and I loved seeing how creative people got with making their special day stand out. However, as a guest invited to so many weddings, the problem becomes: What do I wear??? I can't even say this is a women's issue either, because most of the men I know are very fashionable too, and aren't trying to get tagged in someone's Facebook pic wearing the same thing they wore to a wedding last month...
Yesterday's wedding was probably one of my favourite overall looks, if I do say so myself :) Even though my hair kind of fell apart by the end of the night, I still managed to make it work:
Details on the dress: this is a convertible dress by a Toronto-based design company called Henkaa - I chose these dresses for my bridesmaids, and made sure I grabbed one for myself! These dresses truly work for ANY BODY: they come in a ton of colours; short and long versions; plus-sized options; and you can tie them in a million different ways. I'll need to pick up a couple more, because I could rotate the Henkaa dress in my wardrobe an infinite amount of ways!
As for the hair, I wanted to try a regimen I've seen on a number of other natural hair sites. On Friday night, I washed and deep conditioned my hair (using the products I mention here), then twisted it into about 8 thick twists. The idea was to allow the hair to dry in a stretched state, then set the actual style the next day.
On Saturday morning, I undid the twists, then re-twisted into about 20 twists and pincurled them, laying them flat to my head with bobby pins. I decided to try this versus doing bantu knots, because I wanted to be able to tie my hair down flat for the day, which is impossible with my bantu knot styles. I couldn't for the LIFE of me find my silk scarves, so I tied my hair down with a satin scarf, then did a cute headwrap with a larger cotton wrap. This is very important for me, because cotton sucks the moisture right out of your hair. I've learned from my mistakes of tying down my hair with cotton scarves, then waking up the next day to parched hair - never again! I always ensure that before anything cotton touches my head, there is something silk or satin as a buffer in-between.
Off I went for my day and night....then woke up Sunday morning, ready to unravel and create my wedding style:
My pincurled twists turned out into a cool, serpentine wave, but wasn't set well enough to leave down. So I grabbed my trusty bucket of bobby pins, and got to pinning, and ended up with this cute, curly, side-pinned bouffant style:
I learned that while I liked this regimen and style, I definitely need to trim some dead ends that looked a bit straggly. I also need to play around with the placement of the pincurls so that it doesn't look too separated and scalpy when I take them down. Other than that, I ended up happy that my hair dresser was busy and couldn't take me on Saturday! I got this style for $free.99!