New 'do

I chanced some change with my hairs.  Got 'em all cut off.  Each and every one.

I feel like making big changes in this season, a time for new beginnings, even in my grief.  Yet I also feel exhausted, like the leaves barely clinging to the branches....ready to fall and wither.  I don't want life to just go on.  I don't want to do life without Mom here on this earth, breathing the same air as me, watching the leaves turn and fall, bundling up for winter, planning the season's holiday decor.

Weird.

So I go a hair cut.  Big change.

Everyone so far is gaga over it.  Telling me how young and cute it is.

I don't know what to think.  It's been over a week and I still don't know how to get it to look like the picture up thar (that was the stylist's doing).  I feel naked and vulnerable...like people will see my fat now, not my glorious hair.  No hiding in the tresses or cute flowers.

Mom would love it.  I remember getting my first 'Dorothy Hamill' cut in the '70's and posing out front for Mom's camera.  She liked my hair short.  I had stick straight pixies in 1st and 2nd grade.  Got an asymetrical shaved/swoopy thing in high school.  A short mullet.  Lots of perms.

Here's how it looked a couple days ago after I attempted to style it:

Not so great.  Too structured (Type 4), not enough randomness.

Got a bit closer a this weekend:

I'm definitely not loving the amount of product it takes to do this.  I have no choice now except to play around with it and hope I figure it out.  Or get used to wearing hats. :)

A post about nuthin'. You know, for a change.

Oh hey.

Pulled out the chunky monkey to capture my T1 cuteness the other day.

I'm continuing to figure out if I sorta like or sorta despise my hair.

It definitely needs to grow some more, but I like how it looked on this day.

To bad it still takes $45 worth of unpronounceable goo and about a thousand hours to get it like this.

Ok, that's a lie.

Just dried it, sprayed it, and thought, 'T1 enough'.

Over on the Type 1 DYT facebook page, they're doing a 'wear a dress everyday for a week challenge',

so this was my contribution.

Yay.

What I'm Wearing. 2012 edition.

Haven't done one of these in a good bit.  

Mostly 'cause I've basically been wearing brown velour sweatpants from Walmart for the last 6 months.

Eh.

I'm slowly getting back into clothes from last summer, so I've been playing dress-up again.  

I've also been playing with how to get my hair to have a 'full-bodied' look using  a big barrel curling iron 

and ginormous velcro rollers.

 

It takes FOREVER.  

It also takes a dollop of root lifter the size of Washington state to lift my thick, heavy hair.

Perhaps it's me, but putting product in one's hair that results in it feeling rather, um, like one used 'Stiffy' instead of foam makes one want to jump in the shower and wash one's hair again. *shrugging*  

So today, I managed to slide a thrifted j.jill straight skirt (size 16!) over my hips and actually get it zipped.  

Threw on an apt. 9 thrifted blouse with it.  

Taking pics of oneself makes you notice stuff.  

Like how badly a blouse needs pressed.

Or how a particular T1 gal should REALLY get some new bras to 'lift' the sistahs.

Or the one renegade eyebrow hair.

Natural Toiletries and Cleaners

If you'll remember a couple months back, I committed to removing as many xenoestrogens from my environment as I could.  Because one of the things I'm dealing with adenomyosis, which is an estrogen-driven disease of the uterus, it's important not only to clean up my diet, lose weight and exercise, but to decrease as much as possible the toxic burden on my body in regards to those chemicals and phytochemicals that are known to mimic estrogen (aka: xenoestrogens).

And that would be basically anything that we women rely on to beautify ourselves. 

Eegad.

I thought it might be helpful to walk you thru a typical day of how I clean myself, my clothes and my house using all natural stuff.  If anyone wants recipes for any of this, or want me to make some stuff for ya, just let me know. Some I'm still experimenting, and I have a few more recipes for toiletries and cleaners I'll fiddle with this month.  

First up:  Washing the Person.  

We start with purified water via our shower filter from Aquasana.
(BTW, they're having a huge 50% off sale this month)

Next, a batch of non-scented handmade soap I made just for myself.  

I added all kinds of skin-loving oils and butters, silk fibers, clay and milk powder to make it luxurious.

I actually also use this for my hair.  It takes a bit of getting used to lathering up the locks with bar soap, but now after a couple months, it's no biggie.

Handmade soap can leave a residue on your hair, weighing it down after a several washings.  Plus it doesn't strip your hair of it's natural oils (which actually helps in styling it without using the gels/mousses/sprays), so I've found that once a week or so, it helps to do a vinegar rinse.  I use one of those cake decorating squirt bottles filled about 1/3 full of vinegar and work it thru my hair, rinsing with cool water.  

Let me tell ya, your hair will feel like silk after this, and there won't be a vinegar stink.  

Your comb will breeze right thru the tangles too.  You can use the filtered clear kind too.

After my shower, comes this trio:

Brushing my teeth by dipping my brush in Magnesium Oil, kept in a cute vintage apothecary jar. 

This fixes the transparancy issues, but not the whitening, so I'm looking for something to deal with that.
Daily green smoothies with blueberries are wreaking havoc on the pearly whites :)

I'm also using Xylitol products for cavity protection.  

More on that and the Mag Oil in another post about my suppliments and eating regimin.

Handmade deodorant.  LOVE this stuff.  I used a simple blend of coconut oil, baking soda, cornstarch, and a touch of Magnesium Gel (I'll talk about the gel down further).  

Keeps the stink at bay so long as I wash my pits daily.

This particular recipe goes on like a cream, but next time around I'll add some beeswax to keep it hard.

And a touch of this if I need some moisturizing.  Great for dry patches or all over (not too much!) before bed is heavenly. Oh, and it makes a nice, um, personal lubricant. :)

Moving on, I've already written a couple posts about the natural mineral makeup that I'm using HERE and HERE.  I don't need any styling products for my hair now that I'm using my bar soap, but when I have some flyaways I use a touch of the Magnesium Gel I mentioned above.  I tried using it as a traditional hair gel, but it dulled my hair and made it sorta goofy-feeling.  

Next up:  Washing the Clothing and Household.

Elbow grease, gloves, microfiber mits, scrubbing sponge and simple vinegar and/or baking soda.  This combo works for every surface 'cept for maybe your oven (I do ammonia for that about once every um, four years?)

Since our water is now filtered in the shower, and I use citric acid in my soap formulations, soap scum isn't much of an issue.  I keep it all in a wee basket under my sink.  Just a spritz of vinegar usually does the trick, but sprinkling some baking soda, then spritzing vinegar works great on those more stubborn stains.

For toilets, I spray good ole bleach because I haven't found a good substitute, although I hear vinegar works as well.  May switch to that.  I spritz the surfaces and inside the bowl, turn on the fan and leave for a while, then swish/flush and wipe down the surfaces.

To get clothing and linens clean, I use the stuff in these three glass jars:

Pappa Bear jar is my handmade soap formulated specifically for laundry, 

grated with my Presto Salad Shooter (thank you Goodwill).  

Then 1/2 cup of a mix of washing soda and borax in the Mama Bear jar, and the Baby Bear jar holds the powdered active ingredient in Oxyclean I purchase from the Chemistry Store to avoid the dyes, fragrances and all that rot in the commercial brand. I use a 2 TBLS measure per load.

I'm currently working on a homemade stain stick.  I'll let you know how that goes....

Just takes this wee scoop ('bout 1/4 cup or less) per load of the soap curls, under the filling hot water.

I also fill a downey ball 'bout halfway with vinegar for softening.  

Throw it in on top of the clothes before ya close the lid.

My clean clothes smell CLEAN and are SOFT and static free outta the dryer.  

I will mention that every few times I wash whites, I do short wash with bleach first, then a full wash with the above stuff.

In my experience, handmade laundry products work wonderfully, but now and then, if you have hard water, you may need to run a load with regular detergent and bleach to hold back the dingies.

Because our laundry water isn't filtered, I purchased this laundry pouch from Nature and Wisdom, the same place I get my Mag. Oil and Gel.  It's filled with prills, which make the water less thick (if you can imagine) and helps the cleaning agents agitate more thoroughly thru the clothing. 

Speaking of prills, I drink prill water too.  Here's that set up:

Start with a glass gallon jar.  I had to go to the health food shop to find glass containers...everything at the regular store was plastic.  This happened to be an apple cider jar.

Throw in the packet of prills, which again thin the water so it more easily gets into your cells. Initially you fill the jar with filtered water and let it sit for 24 hours.  Then pour off 3 quarts into a separate container (see below), leaving one quart in the jar.  Refill, and more prill water only takes an hour since the last treated quart was left.  See the line?  I pour off the water till it gets to that point.

This is what I pour the three quarts into.  A glass dispenser found at Gordmans.

And this is what I drink my prill water in.....a glass water bottle that came with our Aquasana shower and kitchen faucet order. I drink at least 3 of these a day...or around 90-100oz of filtered prill water.

Here's the Aquasana filter on our sink faucet.  Ya pull that little sticky-outy thing on the front of the spigot to get the clean water.  So far we've been really pleased with Aquasana.  We'll replace the 2 shower filters and the sink filter every 6 months.

 For hand washing dishes (and just plain old hand washing) we use my handmade liquid soap.  Let me tell you how much I HATE making liquid soap.  Quite the ordeal. When this gets used up, we'll switch to just a plain old handmade bar soap.

The only cleaner I've not had consistent success with is dishwasher detergent.  I had been using this trio (why is everything in 3's?)  Baking Soda/Borax mix, a touch of organic dish detergent in the prewash, and vinegar in the rinse.

This combo certainly get stuff clean-especially since we presoak our dishes in the sink, but it leaves a cloudy residue on the glasses.  So now we use just a touch of this:

I'd like to just get into the habit of handwashing the dishes and using the dishwasher as a ginormous dry rack.

We shall see....

Let me know if you have any questions.  It's been a fun challenge for me to do this.  

I feel good getting the toxic junk outta of the house as much as possible.  

It's only been a couple months, but it's all mostly routine now. 

Thanks for reading!

Hair Makeover.

Got my hair done last night for the first time since last June.  I know.  I think it's been a year since I've actually had it cut.  I know.  Don't judge.

Here's my wicked long hair as of last month...pulling my energy down, and wasting my energy trying to keep it out of my face:

Yeah, it was random, but not exactly what I'd call airy, bouncy, light, and fun.  It was rather blah and heavy, actually.  But I liked hiding in it.  Perhaps people might notice my long sweepy hair instead of my thighs, you know?  Ahem.

So here's me today, with my new 'do:

Kapow!  Went to a new stylist that had been recommended to me.  Dressed my truth best I could, sat down in the chair and said "I want fun, light, random, and easy.  Hop to it."  Ok, so I didn't say that exactly, but I did bring in pictures of what I was looking for.  We did highlights and toner, and she cut off almost enough to be donated to Locks of Love. I think I still see paint in it.  That'd be from 2 weeks ago.  *cough*

See my highlights?

Then she added tons of layers and notching to get height around my crown.  She actually used 5 big hot rollers to set it, and I thought it was a good way to get height quickly, and bring large random wave to my hair.  I still have quite a lot of curl left from my spiral perm, so I should have lots of options in styling it. And I like options.
 

Up until this point in my life, I sorta kinda didn't want to make too much effort on my outward appearance because, well, I'm fat.  About 70 pounds of fat above normal.  I'm thinking I liked the Type 2 clothes because they're drapey and loose and you can hide your shape in them. 

 Switching to the Type 1 colors has been easy because I love them....switching to the more crisp fabrication and animation has been a bit of an issue.  Due to my overweightness (I make up words all the time.  Don't hate.) I don't like anything pinching or too tight or draws attention to my thighs me.  'Course maybe it was my 1-ness all the time, now that I think about it.

  (my thinking face)

Anyway, much of my clothing is a size too big.  And I thought getting prettied-up was a waste of time because in our culture, when you're fat you're not just less-than....you're invisible.  Which for a Type 1 like me, was rather painful.  Even though I was embarrassed by my weight, I still wanted to wear fun clothes, but when I did, I felt ashamed for drawing attention to myself and my body.  A terrible catch 22, eh?

 (I'm agreeing with myself)

I'm trying really hard to embrace my nature as a Type 1, and have been playing with some pretty over-the-top accessories and color combos.  Some of it feels a bit overdone for everyday, and due to my Type 4 secondary I think I'll end up toning it down a bit for the most part in the long run.  I do like my clinky bracelets and dangley earrings and sparkly rings though!

Speaking of which, although I posted lots of my new clothes and accessories in my first post, here's some more funness....

A PERFECT Type 1 watch, all bright gold with circles and bling (bought at JCPenneys):

Some wicked fun sandals with animated gold flowers....another Type 1 gal (by my reckoning) at the salon last night noticed them immediately and asked where I got them (Charlotte Russe).

With my bright pink toenails and a super cute gold curly-cue toe ring (from Cato), I look quite sassy if I do say so myself.   When I wore them to church on Easter,  I didn't even think about my thighs.  That's progress folks.

I'm having fun playing....my closet is looking more and more like a true Type 1:

And it's totally wicked neat to have so much fun jewelry to mess around with.  See that charm watch above?  Each of the three hearts is ingraved with a word: Faith, Hope, Joy.  Can't get more Type 1 than that, KWIM? (There's a closeup of this bracelet watch in my banner up thar yonder.)

Here's my key-oooot blue reading glasses.  And the pearl bobbly bracelet is actually a necklace....I posted a close-up of it in yesterday's post. It has flowers painted on some of the pearls.

That's it for today.  Did you know Carol's newest book Dressing Your Truth-Discover Your Personal Beauty Profile is coming out tomorrow?  I'm totally stoked, and can't wait to share it with my friends.  On my other blog, I wrote a bit about it yesterday along with what's Carol's Beauty Profiling and Dressing Your Truth programs have meant to me. 

I'm hoping to post each day about some element of Dressing Your Truth, so stop by and let's chat!  What kinds of things have you bought from the Type 1 Chroma?  Cool accessories?  What have you had problems with concerning the five elements of Dressing Your Truth?


 And tell me what you think of my hair....