My Best Friend & Warrior in the Faith

Greetings All,

I finally got some pictures of my best friend, Karen. She is a wonderful person, friend, mother & daughter. A loving and considerate person with her mind made up for Jesus Christ. We have been and gone thru a lot these 7 years. I thank GOD for her and am honored that she is my friend. We started locking her hair I guess 5 years ago. I really do not like that I did not journalize her journey properly. We started it on a Mother's day weekend let's say 5 years ago. We were chilling at my place and she asked if I would start her locs. She had recently went from a perm to a TWA. Her hair was growing and she asked me to start them. I told her all I knew how to do is a braid or plait and since we had never talked about it before, her locking, I did not think she was serious. She assured me she was and I started her locks that day. I do have a very small amounts of pics when we were fooling around with my mini cam. Let's see what I can find.

These were taken looks like Nov 2007. We were resting after a weekend of ministry & church service on a Sunday evening.

I know I have a picture of her after inital install but I can not find it. She probably does not want me to. :-) Ok, I found one of them. It took me a couple of days but here it is. Not as in focus as I would like, but here it is. The date of this photo is 25 Jun 05. Her locs may only be 4 years old.


I say we when talking about Karen's journey because she is/was a licensed beautician for over 20 years. What happened is I installed and then any she felt were too large she resized. ;-) It was perfect, she resized and I fussed at her and left her work alone.

In the meantime, I shared all that I know/knew with her and she shared what she knows with me. I think we did a great job. When I started interlocking my own locs about the time I started Karen's I was so new to it that I did not want to mess her's up, but given her hair type I probably should have interlocked her's from the start. Her hair type is more like the s curly shape, some thin and all soft. To me, she is one of those people who should have never started perming but with my mind set now, none of us ever should have. Sorry digressed again. I banded her hair the first few months when I shampooed it. Once she started locking I stopped the band braiding. She wanted to see her scalp and never wanted that wild and wooly look that I like so I did as she asked and I did my version of the palm roll on her locs. I call it my version because I never could get my mind to cooperate with my hands to palm roll. So I used a lock gel applied to the unlocked root and twisted all the hair into the loc. Simple and it worked. I am thinking that the pics above she was two years into her loc journey.

Today she is still happy and locked, we have gone thru some hair issues but she has intro some hair vitamins & other things into her diet and the locks are healthy again.

Karen helped me restart my second set of locs, as stated before. Instead of me restarting her set I have taken her though a lot of clarifying shampoos & I have even used dawn dish detergent on her hair. ACV rinses everything I know. I even tried the Olgin soap on Karen's locs it does absolutely nothing but on mine it works, not sure why but different stroks for different folks. I am sincere about get all the dirt out of our locs, her's & mine. The two pics above are Karen just yesterday 16 Oct 09, I shampooed her hair with clarifying shampoo and reintroduced a lot of oil on her scalp because the clarifying is very drying on her scalp. I interlocked only a few because I could not go a full 4 point turn on most. I knoted a few locs with thin spots and then she went to the mirror in the bathroom for her usual inspection and said Ro we need to trim the ends. She said we cut some of her locs I guess last year, my shifting memory again. Her locs had a rounded look to them kind of like a smile ) it was cute. She said trim I asked what shape she said straight I pointed to a particular spot and lined it with me finger she said yes. I picked up the scissors and started trimming. I think I missed two that I did not see until we saw this picture. In either case we were both satisfied with the trim. We figured we trimed about 2 inches. Her locs are lovely aren't they!

Well I am out for now.

Many blessings & much Agape!