Around June of last year I cut off my first set.

I did this in mourning for a dear friend of mine, a fellow dreadie who died of cancer. The dreads were in good enough condition that they were able to be made into a custom human hair wig by a friend of mine and donated to a little girl who wanted dreads but had lost her hair to chemo.

I spent a year growing my natural hair out.

Once it was a little past my shoulders, I started the second set last week. I have been off shampoo since my first set so my hair was already prepped. I did some TnR and have been leaving it alone. Sleeping in a wool tam.

That's it.

I am about three days into this new set and they are all coming undone and starting to section themselves off again. I love this part of the process. The new profile pic was taken the night I did the TnR so my second set of dreads has a birthday of 7/9/14.

I know the only reason my dreads were healthy enough to donate was because of this site and the advice I received here. I missed you guts!

My life kind of got away from me.

I'm living back in civilization and my life is whirlwind again. Hard to believe 2 years ago I started this process.

My dreads are still alive and well (And still whispy on the ends after 2 years. I've grown to love it).

I'll take pics in a min. I missed you guys.

Hey dreadies.

It's been awhile since I was here.

It's been a little over a year - mine are still changing, still growing and still suprising me.

I still have loose hairs, I still have whispy ends, some are waaay fatter than others, and the ones on the bottom and back have dreaded up way tighter than the others. You'll notice, I have no beads. they look super fat in the middle. When I started this set I originally did half backcombing, half TnR. Eventually it all fell out and did what it wanted anyway.

They look like they have their own identity. They often smell like oranges because my shampoo bar is orange. In the summer, I use BC/ACV and thats it....Winter I use a natural shampoo bar.

I love them.

They are wild, and untamed and Mine.

I stopped brushing my hair, and threw out my shampoo. I decided that since thats when I started just letting it go...thats when I'd call it "birthday". Yes I did VERY LIGHT back-combing about a month ago...but only once and mostly I haven't touched them. Happy Birthday babies!
Find more photos like this on dreadlocks forums

My dreadlock journey (as strange as this may sound to most of you) started by accident. It wasn't planned and I learned nothing about various dreading methods or...implementationbefore hand. I live in a really remote area and we treat our own water. It all started because I had a strong desire NOT to put anything artificial down the drain...so I read up on ways to clean my hair without shampoo...and settled on BS/ACV (mostly because thats what I had lying around). I went through the adjustment period with that and discovered Dr. Bronners...which I wash with sometimes as well. As my hair adjusted I noticed that my usually easily tangled naturally wavy red/brown mess was extremely difficult to comb without the artificial conditioners...I spent an extremely large amount of time and effort doing warm olive oil treatments and I bought about 6 different kinds of brushes and combs.

I would have to comb and or brush about 5 times a day to keep my hair from tangling up...after a particularly difficult day where I BROKE 3 of my hair combing devices by simply trying to comb my hair (i'm not kidding)...I decided that I was done with it. That was about 6 months ago.

Within the last 2 months, people began asking me how old my dreads were...and how long I had been dreading. To be honest, I was just ignoring my hair because it pissed me off. It has been snowing here since early October, and most of the time my hair is shoved up under a wool hat out of necessity. When I would go to work I'd throw it back in a pony tail of some kind of thing and that was it.

I spent most of the last monthseparatingsections and I did some very light back combing one time as a defining method. Ididn'tdecide I wanted dreads till my hair had been dreading for 5 months. I'm slow sometimes at listening to my body. I'm learning.

People keep asking me when I started my dreads, and I don't know how to answer. They were dreading for 5 months before I realized I wanted to dread. I'd love to be able to at least answer people when they ask me when I started dreading, but I'd love to be able to do it honestly. What do you guys think?