Ouch!

Rerooting hair is painful. Especially when you stab yourself repeatedly in the thumb with the crochet hook. I had not realised this, having never used such a small one before, but they are equiped with a needle like tip and will slip into the pad of your thumb like a hot knife into butter. Painful. Then there's the shoulder pain from forcing the awl in to make additional holes in the hard unforgiving Basaak scalp again and again and again (the partline had barely any scalp holding it together so I had to go on either side of it). Many times in today's session I've caught myself fantasising about sinking the doll needle into the soft squishy surface of a cool cat scalp. If I ever decide to do this again, I will use one of those!

I say doll needle rather than crochet hook because with the harder scalp and my inexperience, it just wasn't working for me. Somehow the strands of saran were catching on the rough edges of the holes and the loops on the back were really untidy...not to mention that I spent a lot of time pulling out poorly secured plugs and redoing the same row. Not fun. In the end I've decided upon an unorthodox method that uses a needle threader and a doll needle. Not nearly so stabby that way. I may revert to the hook once I'm onto the spiral bit and the holes aren't so close together - we'll see.

Also, a word of warning to anyone contemplating taking on this madness - when the tutorials say to keep the saran wet they mean it. It dries very quickly and becomes impossible to handle. Oh and the puchi collective tutorial is great, but when they refer to using "a small handful" of hair at a time, they actually mean a small amount of hair - about as much as you can pinch between two fingers. Because if you pull out too much at once, you can't separate the strands nicely and end up with a hideous tangled mess and will more than likely need to throw it away in frustration, thus increasing the worry about not having ordered enough hair... Not that I speak from experience or anything :P



This is my pitiful progress for the day. Not much huh? All I managed to complete so far is the partline. I will at least concede that I have gotten neater and faster and don't have to unpick any more. Over the weekend I hope to thatch it. I live in hope that this is the slowest and most difficult part of the process, otherwise I may go crazy before I'm done.

I do like the colour though. Bit of a change from the blonde!