this hairy life.

Last day to enter the Shabby Apple dress giveaway! 

{hair embroidery by laura normandin}

I've just spent a ridiculous amount of time researching dresses using tresses. When I was about 10 years old or so, I would stay up late on Friday nights and watch 20/20 with my mom. Sometimes we'd watch it upstairs in her bedroom, moments I absolutely relished. One episode has stuck with me: an old woman who saved her hair for however many years to create a floor-length dress, complete with hat. Her dress was coffee-colored though the hair on her head (not the hat!) was now grey. I think about this lady--without fail--every time I shower.

{by kate kretz}

During pregnancy you basically stop shedding (shedding being a normal part of the hair growth cycle). About three months post-delivery when hormone levels level out, you start losing about a year's worth of hair--all at once. While it drives me batty enough all day long as I hourly unravel it from R's tiny fingers, the sheer quantity is most obvious in the shower. Nests of it. Surely enough to make a hat--and maybe some booties for the baby.

So every shower I think of this regal woman wearing her hair. And then I think: Is this going to become a blog post?

'Cuz that's kinda gross. But here it is, friends. I just couldn't resist. I'm obsessed. And while human hair collecting may be unsettling, we do use sheep hair for all kinds of things--so why not our own? I have to admit I nearly kept R's two baby dreds, which we cut a few weeks ago. (For the record, we do wash him, but he thrashes his head at night when he's rooting to eat; which started knotting his wispy locks. So the knots grew. Until we cut them out. Does that make me a bad mom?) I reckon S tossed the dreds out the window, though, because suddenly they were gone.

Do you secretly keep your old hair or the hair of someone you love?