Just Wondering Wednesday #5

As I've been recently freaking out  mildly stressed due to some things here on the home front, I've had some cravings for chocolate - amongst other junk food.  Bad - I know - but hey, I'm a woman and I get cravings now and then.  Wish I didn't - but I do!

Anyway, that got me to thinking about this week's Just Wondering Wednesday.  It's not going to be hair related today - so hopefully you'll still want to play along!

So today I'm just wondering -- if you are craving something (assuming others out there besides myself get them) do you prefer something sweet -- like chocolate, ice cream or candy.  Or are you a snacky kind of person - wanting chips, popcorn, you know - things that are crunchy?  And if you crave things like broccoli or celery - um .... I just don't wanna know! LOL  JK - you can tell me.  I'm sure there are some of you out there that are stronger than I am!

So the question for today is - Sweet or Salty?!

(ok - or healthy stuff!)

And in case you were wondering -- I'm sweet stuff all the way!  

Give me chocolate & we're set!

Up for grabs today?

Another $5 GC from Sally's. 

So - hopefully you know the deal by now - leave a comment here to enter & on Friday I'll announce the winner.  Have a great day!

Spin Pin Video

As promised, here's the video on Spin Pins.  They are so stinkin' easy to use - so if you end out buying them I hope you love them as much as we do.  In the video my hands were a bit slippery because of her damp hair so they go in and out even faster then I'm showing just because I was having a hard time holding onto them due to my damp hands!

*** To see our review and a few other pictures where we used these go HERE.

I have heard they hold best in thicker hair - and I imagine they'd work fabulous in curly hair since there is even more texture to grab onto.  We've used these in both damp hair (from after a bath) and dry hair & they work great either way.

Hope this helps with your questions of how they work & if they are easy to use or not! They really are a cool invention & they do what they say they will!

Winner

Sorry I'm posting this so late.  I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off today.  I'm headed off to a Youth Conference with a bunch of youth from my church for a few days next week & I've been trying to get myself ready, along with things here on the home front.  So it's non-stop craziness around here!

As far as the winner of the $5 Sally's gift card ....

And that goes to ... Hotel CaliFarnsworth (isn't that the cutest Blogger ID?!)

So Hotel CaliFarnsworth - get back to me a.s.a.p. so I can hopefully get your gift card in the mail before I'm sleeping in a tent & cooking s'mores over a campfire!

I'm hoping to have a few posts going while I'm gone, but if things are quiet here for a day or two, you'll know why!  Hope everyone has a fun filled weekend.  Thanks again to everyone who played this week's Just Wondering Wednesday!

Spin Pin Bun & Review

Everyone that guessed on my "Mystery Hair Accessory" the other day was right -- they are the new & funky Spin Pins from Goody.  They are part of a new accessory line they are calling Goody Simple Styles.  And this is what they look like:

*** To see our video using them go HERE ***

As I'd mentioned, I'd been eying these for a while - kept seeing ads pop up here and there and so I'd gone and watched stuff about them and was intrigued - mainly about the Spin Pin because they say they are the equivalent to 20 bobby pins.  And as you know - we use lots of bobby pins at our house!  I was excited to find that you could buy them at Target, Wal-Mart and other drug stores, as well as online.  I went to find them at Target, but they didn't sell the Spin Pins.  They sold other parts of the the Simple Styles collection but no Spin Pins.  All of them were selling for $4.99-$5.99.  Then one of my readers, Vera,  told me she found them at Wal-Mart so I tried there but they were out.  So I finally gave in & bought the whole collection on line from Goody.com for $14.99 + SH.  It was cheaper to buy the whole lot of them than just one at a time.  So I got my packet recently (and it did come fairly quickly) & this is what you get.  It comes in a cute little divided pouch too.

On the left is their equivalent of the "bumpit" I think (at least form their description.)  Then the spin pins, next is their "Modern Updo Maker" and then on the far right is the "Pony Pouf Clip".  I've only played around a little with the other ones, so I'll have to post more about those as I try them.

I've made a video of how to put the Spin Pins in - but I've got to edit it a little bit & was having issues w/it last night, so I'll get that to you soon - but here are a few pictures of the quick & easy buns we've made so far using them.  They seriously are amazing!  I used them first in Goose's hair and I've got to tell you I haven't made a little twisted bun in her hair in years because her hair is just so thick & the bobby pins tend to start scooting out after no time.

But with the Spin Pins all I did was brush her hair back, twist it into a bun and twist in the Spin Pins on top and bottom.  I left the ends spraying out a bit so it looked a bit playful & messy & that was it.

Because we didn't secure the ponytail with a rubber band, I was a bit nervous because her hair hung a bit looser & I was sure it'd fall out w/in a while.  But .... it didn't.  These stayed in & held her hair for a full day of summer playing - out on the swing set, rough housing w/Bug, etc.  It did loosen up a bit by the end of the day & sat lower on her head - but they held on strong!

Only at the very tail end of the day when she was playing with her cousins on banana chairs (rubbing her head against the back of the chairs and such) did the bun actually almost come out.  She came to me and had me twist them out so she didn't have to worry about them.  But any hairdo was doomed with the way they were being crazy on those banana chairs!

Here's our attempt on Bug using them.  Because her hair is a bit thinner, I actually put her hair in a ponytail & then twisted it into the bun and added the Spin Pins.

Once again, I just left hairs stick out to make it look more than just a regular bun.  It looked really cute and stayed in pretty well.  I've heard they don't stay in as well in thin hair - and since these are made for grown women, I could see that.  The Spin Pins stayed in fairly well in Bug's hair - but they might have held better had I not started with the rubber band first.  I'm not sure.

Anyway - my overall review of the Spin Pins is -- They are awesome!  They really do hold like they say.  And if you are a working gal and sit at a desk most of the day (and not acting like a crazy 8 year old) - I don't see your hair going anywhere with these things in it!  It'll stay put.  The best part is how fast it is to make a bun & twist these in & then you're ready to go.  Goose wants her hair up a lot during the summer, as it gets so hot, so I'm excited to have added these beauties to our line of "hair artillery accessories!"  I'm looking forward to trying a few different things with these & I'll show you once I do.  If you want to learn more about their whole Simple Styles Collection you can go HERE.

Stay tuned for my video on these -- the really aren't hard to use at all.  Sorry I couldn't get it put together for this post today!  I'd love to know if you've bought any of the collection and what your thoughts/opinions are on these!

Just Wondering Wednesday #4

Well, it's officially Summer & can I say - "It's about time!?"  It seems like the weather has just been cold then hot cold then hot.  I think it's finally going to stay warm around here now.

So our question for today is another hair related one and sort of a 2 part question.

What color is your hair today?

And is it your "real" natural color . . . 

or does it come from a bottle/salon/or

some other form of coloring?

In case you were wondering - my hair is blond/brown.

I get blond highlights from my hair dresser - 

if I didn't get highlights my hair would be a "lovely" Puke Ash 6.  Ack.

Up for grabs today?

A $5 gift card to Sally's.  

You could put it towards those Curlformers you've been holding off getting, or towards one of my favorite 1 lb. boxes of bobby pins! hehe

Anyway - remember, if you want in for this gift card, be sure to comment here & come back Friday when I'll announce the winner.  Remember - I need a way to contact you so be sure to give me one!  Thanks for playing & have a Happy Day!

Mystery Accessory & New Winner

Two items of business here today in Hairland.  First that of a fun new accessory that I'm so excited to show you - but first I'm just going to give you a sneak peek at it:

And to just give you an idea of the real size (since in pictures it's sometimes hard to gauge) - I can fit a pen up through it.  And just to give you a hint - no - it's not a metal one of THESE.

I'd been eying (eye-ing - the other way looks weird to me today!) these for a while.  And then one of my great readers Vera wrote me about them and her testimonial was enough for me to spring for them.  Stay tuned for more on this Mystery Accessory!

Also, sadly enough I never heard back from last weeks winner -- so I had to pick a new one.  This time it went on the high end of the spectrum and picked:

So that means Kathy - you win!

I think she must have a lucky charm or something because she won the awesome headbands from Stylish Mode.com over at Hairland's Shareland!  So Kathy - get back to me w/your address & I'll mail you your Target gift card!

Cascade/Feathered Braid Hairstyle

So I'm sure you've all been waiting on the edge of your seats to find out what hairdo I'd come up with using THIS VIDEO that I posted last week, right?!  Yeah right!  It's ok - you don't have to be embarrassed, I know you have! hehe  Only kidding!!

Alright, enough of the silly stuff.  I actually came up with this as another hair request.  Love that you guys keep me on my toes with things!  This was for Anissa H.  She had a school dance and said she could do pretty much any kind of braid and was looking for something that was half up-half down.  It was initially for a friends hair that was shorter, so I opted to use Bee for this, since she obviously has the shortest hair of the babes.  Just as a side note - this style is obviously too mature for Bee - but she's just the model here - nothing more!

Begin by parting out the hair on the top of the head like you're going to make a bang "poof."  Start making a basic 3 stranded braid (but make it rather loose up front), but after a few plaits make it a cascading/feathered  like in the video. (click HERE if you haven't watch it yet) **I left hair out of both sides of the braid for all the braids in this style. **

Braid to the end of the hair & secure it with a rubber band.  Then push the braid forward a bit up front and make and X with bobby pins to give yourself a little "poof" up front for your bangs. Just as hint - I did most of this style dry so fly aways and wispy hairs are a-plenty in this style.  But that's ok.  It's a fun & funky one!

When you're done with this braid it should look all crazy like this:

Now move to the right side of the head.  Part the hair down to the ear & hold the hair behind the ear out of the way with a clip for now.

I then did a half French braid - (you can watch my video HERE).  You can do a full French braid or whatever you prefer here.  Braid back until you reach the ear & can no longer incorporate any more hair for the French braiding part.

Then continue braiding the rest of the way down the hair - using the cascading/feather braid technique.  Secure it with a rubber band temporarily. 

Repeat on the left side with the Half-French braiding and the cascading/feather braid to the end.

Now pull both braids from the left and right side together and join them on top of the head with a rubber band.  It'll be on top of the braid you did at the very beginning that runs down the middle of your head.  The pulled up braids should hopefully sort of sit on their sides so the hair you pulled out as you plaited the braid will cascade down from below.

Now take the tail from the middle braid (the 1st one you did) - it may be hiding under things right now ...

and take the tail of that braid up and over...  and then under the braids you pulled from the side and secured on top.

If that doesn't make sense maybe my arrow will help!

It's going to make a loop basically.  You can bobby pin it in place if you worry about it slipping, but I just pulled it through and it pretty much stayed.

Here's another view from the side.  Hopefully this makes sense.  With all the wispy hairs from the braids it's hard to see everything.

For the final step take a small curling iron & curl all those feathered/cascading pieces of hair you'd left out as you'd braided the hair. 

Work your way around the head, curling all those little wisps of hair!  Be sure to curl the ends of the braids too (the one that is looped around, as well as the one that is from the 2 braids joined in the middle!)

Once you've curled your way across the braids that's it!  I straightened all the hair that was hanging down try give those braids & curls a bit more "pop" and make them more noticeable.  I then added a fancy little fan comb I had laying around for a finishing touch!

She didn't want to stand up for me when I started taking the "final" pictures!  She was striking quite the poses though!

Like I said, she was being silly so I don't have really any good shots form the front.  But you hopefully get the idea from this front-ish view!

There you have it.  I think this style has a fun & funky look - yet is simple & pretty.  Pretty much any age could use it.  For some reason when I got done the style reminded me of something Gwen Stefani would wear!  Not sure if it was just the hair color or what!  Let me know what you think.  Like this one or not?!

Oh -- and I've yet to hear from last week's Just Wondering Wednesday winner.  Get back to me soon or I'll need to pick another one! :-)

Friday Flashback & The Winner

To be quite honest, I've never professed to be cool - never thought of myself as such.  In fact, I'd consider myself quite the opposite  -- especially back in my younger years.  Anyway - I recently got quite the trip down memory lane when my mom recently found a bunch of these beauties packed away somewhere in her house:

Anyone else wear these in their hair?  I'm hoping I wasn't so uncool that I'm the only one that sported one of these puppies in my hair back in the 80's or early 90's!??  I did have longer hair at one point of my teenage years.  I sported the rather poofy bangs and loved to put my hair in a ponytail topped by one of these fluffy loopy bows.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that my mom was ahead of her time in the whole bow making industry .... check these out:

My mom made all these "fabulous" bows to match different outfits we had.  If she sewed us a dress or outfit, you better believe we had a matching hair accessory to go with it! We had 2 big long fabric strips that hung in our bathroom (I have a sister too) and she'd sewn button holes in them so we could slide the clips through them and fasten them onto the strip of fabric.  Like I said - waaaay ahead of the bow making industry that exists today! LOL

We even had clips that were interchangeable that changed out easily with Velcro attached!  Talk about stylin!  But like I said - maybe I'm alone in my fluffy loopy bow world, since I was such the epitome of coolness! ROFL!  So - someone please chime in and let me know I wasn't alone!?  I don't want to be hearing crickets over here!!  Oooh, I have a great idea -- maybe I should open an Etsy store & try sell these babies - along with these gems we made a while back!!!  hehe

Anyway - thank you for taking a trip down memory lane with me .... so onto the reason you're probably really here:

The winner from this week's "Just Wondering Wednesday" is:

And that means that "LegalChic" is the winner!

Congrat's to you!  Please e-mail me so I can get your mailing address to send you your Target gift card!  Thanks to everyone who played along this week.  Hope everyone has a great weekend & a wonderful Father's Day!

Scare

If you tried to get on my site this morning, you may have not been overly successful.  I wasn't either.  In fact, I was completely helpless -- I couldn't access my gmail account, nor anything blogger related.  It was sheer panic to say the least.  I've heard word that people received e-mails from my babesinhairland account through g-mail that were phishing e-mails -- so I'm not so sure if someone hacked into my accounts or it was just a freak thing with blogger/google.  If you got a weird e-mail from me -- it wasn't me & I hope you didn't  open it or it didn't cause your computer problems. Either way - I had no warning or sign of this happening.  It just happened.

If you read over on Girly Do's you might have gotten a heads up about all this, but the timing of it all couldn't have been worse for everything to go down!  So thanks so much to Jenn for helping get the word out. 

Either way, thanks to my husband finding a random site out there that offered a suggestion of how to restore things it worked & it appears that we are back in business.  (Go HERE for the site.  It was the 2nd link offered in his post about restoring a Google account.)  Because filling out "help" forms through blogger & google was getting me no where and would have taken ages to get matters resolved -if they'd even have been resolved I was very relieved that we found that guys site.  Needless to say it has left me exhausted & feeling very vulnerable and gave me another migraine today!

So I just wanted to let you know I am still here.  And this has been a learning experience for me.  My brother, (PS HERO.com) is a computer guru, to say the least, and he is going to get me set up so that Blogger doesn't own my stuff & this can't happen again (yes they do own it despite it being a dot com now).  So if you come & there are changes being made or anything is different around here for a while, it's probably related & I hope you'll have patience with me through all of this.

Thanks to all your inquiries of concern and wondering what was going on.  I'm just thankful it wasn't all lost! 

Cascade/Feathered Braid Video

Here's a sneak peak at a fun & funky new braid that I'll be using in an upcoming hairstyle.  May not look like much now, but stay tuned ... :-)

To see all the styles we've done using this technique go HERE

And of course, if you didn't see yesterday's post & haven't commented yet - scroll down a bit & to "Just Wondering Wednesday" and enter to win!

Just Wondering Wednesday #3

Here we are again for another installment of Just Wondering Wednesday - and to be honest I can't believe it's already Wednesday this week.  I almost forgot!

Let's go to a hair related topic this week.

So I'm Just Wondering .... 

is your hair cut short, medium, or long?  

Doesn't matter if you have it long and you wear it up to make it shorter, etc.  Is your hair short - as in above the shoulders?  Medium - past your shoulders but not by a lot?  Or long - like middle of your back or longer?

And in case you were wondering - and didn't know already - mine is short - as in A-line short!

Up for grabs this week?  Another $5 Target gift card! 

So ... comment away to enter yourself for the gift card.  Remember if you e-mail me your answer directly it doesn't get counted by the random # generator - so if you want to be entered for the gift card you'll need to comment on this post!  Don't forget to leave a way for me to contact you when you comment!

Letters to Juliet Hairstyle

First off -- I haven't heard back from last weeks winner from "Just Wondering Wednesday."  So go HERE and double check if it's you or not!  If I haven't heard back from the winner by the end of today I'll pick another one tomorrow morning!

So back in the middle of May I received an e-mail from Lucy O. with this picture attached.  She said she'd been to see Letters to Juliet and wondered if I might be able to recreate the style in the picture.  The kids were finishing up school and with other things going on in my life I told her I'd love to try the style, but it might be a while.

Over the last couple weeks I've tried this style a couple different times and ways, and this is the one I ended out liking the best and that worked the best for us.  I'm not saying this is necessarily the way they got this look Amanda Seyfried in the movie, but it looked really pretty when we got done.  I went and watched the trailer for these next pictures (I still haven't seen the movie but totally want to) - but I'm assuming this is the scene where Lucy got the above picture.

First I made a very small side part on the right side of her head.  Maybe an inch or two.  Then gently parting the hair at the ear on the right side and pulling it towards the left side of the head.

Bring that section of hair towards the back of the head and make a seam of bobby pins.  Try make them a bit straighter and up & down than I did!  Do a couple of X's to secure it well.

Then part the hair from the left ear and bring it towards the middle of the back of the head.  Don't pull all the hair as if you were parting from ear to ear though.  You'll leave hair in the middle.

See how I've got hair hanging down in the middle here?  When we tried taking all the hair from ear to ear it caused major cone head -so we opted for just sections of hair from each side.

 

Take the section of hair from the left side and twist it around your fingers - turning your fingers inward toward the head.

As you are turning the hair, be sure you are moving the hair towards the seam of bobby pins on the right.  You'll want to cover those up in this process.

Carefully remove your fingers from the twisted hair.  (I found this to be the trickiest part so don't get frustrated!)  Using damp hair helps a bit.

Once your fingers are out of the twist, secure it from the top with a bobby pin.

Insert another bobby pin from the bottom as well.  Add a few more if you fill your twist needs it.

When you are done the hair should sit about like this.

So here are our comparison shots:

A tip: Be sure not to push your seam of bobby pins on the right side too high or you'll get this "nice" curve in the hair on the right side leading into the twist (as you can see I got!)  The hair from the right side should come right into the twist without that little hiccup!

I think when they did Amanda Seyfried's hair they used even less for the twist.  But Goose has such thick hair as I removed my fingers from the twist it made it a bit longer than what Amanda Seyfried wears in the movie.  Either way it turned out to be a very pretty style and it stayed in nicely with all the bobby pins.  Amanda Seyfried also wears this style a bit looser and has a few strands pulled out on each side tucked behind her ears.  I believe she has long bangs or layers going on  as you can see in this picture and we opted not to do that for Goose since she doesn't have the layers.

So thank you Lucy O. for your suggestion to do this style.  I always love getting requests from my readers because I'm always up for a good challenge.  If you have sent me a request lately - and I know there are several of you waiting - don't worry - I haven't forgotten about you!  I'll e-mail you when they are ready to go!