Hair trial

I have one local bridesmaid. In fact, she's so local that she lives just up the hallway from me, which is really pretty great, because planning a wedding while in college and far away from everyone else involved sometimes leaves me feeling pretty despondent and isolated. She helps keep me from feeling that way.

Yesterday at lunch with a friend, I was mentioning my ideas for hairstyles on the bridesmaids. She offered to let me experiment with her hair. The idea struck me as an excellent one, so I emailed O'Molly (my local bridesmaid, who is Irish, and so I will make jokes about her name) and invited her over to my room for a hair trial. The aforementioned friend actually wasn't able to make it until after I'd got ready for bed, so we decided to reschedule.

What I find particularly satisfying about last night's hair trial was that she showed up with clean, dry (very slippery) hair, and none of the styles we tried took more than a few spritzes of styling wax, a brush, and a handful of bobby pins. Also, none of them took me more than ten minutes at most, including deliberation about what to try.

I didn't document each step of styling, but I did document most of the results, so I can try and recreate things again later. I did not reference any guides while doing the styling, but before she stopped by, I spent about an hour reading the Bobby Pin Blog, and looking at hairstyling instructional videos on YouTube.

All pictures are by me, with awful quality because it was nighttime in a basement dorm room, and my camera is old, and I hate using the flash.

So, first we tried some very traditional-looking victory rolls. I loved these, but O'Molly was less than impressed. Also, they could have been a lot higher, but her hair, as I mentioned before, is slippery, and it took me a while to get used to working with it/get enough wax in it to make it do what I wanted. Please note that awesome red lipstick. It, along with some sort of vintage hairstyle, will probably be a requirement.


O'Molly decided that red lipstick and the awesome swing music we were listening to still weren't quite enough to set the mood, so she went and changed into a fancy-schmancy dress. She thought it would be fun. I agree. It was.


We tried the victory rolls in front with the rest of the hair down. Can we say bombshell? This might be my favorite of everything we attempted.

Next we tried what is actually a modification of the way my mom styles her hair. I love the way this looked in back, although we had to use a hair band to hold the front in place. For the actual wedding, I think I would use a clip.



Just for fun, I tried out a pompadour with a scarf, which is more rockabilly than our wedding will be, but still hilarious. I thought she looked super cute like this, but I think she thought it was a little ridiculous.


And last, but not least, we tried a made-up style that combined elements of the rest, and then completed the look with a hair flower. I made that thing myself, y'all! I plan to make several more--one for each bridesmaid, with a different flower for each girl. That one took me about 15 minutes, which is an amount of work totally out of proportion to how great it looks.



We were big, big fans of the flower.

After that, O'Molly had to go to work, so I had to resort to playing with my own hair. I post this partly so O'Molly won't feel totally singled out with this entry, and partly because Dave suggested that he wouldn't mind if I started wearing my hair and makeup like this every day.



What do you think? Is the rockabilly/1950's/Rosie the Riveter look for me? And which of O'Molly's hairstyles did you like the best?

Stylings

So, I never thought I would be enough of a control freak to dictate how my bridesmaids wore their hair. I've been a bridesmaid twice, and neither time was I even given any guidance about hair.

But, there's a very specific vintage look I have in mind, and a great vintage hairstyle is only going to help it shine through. So, I've been poking around the internet looking for ideas. One of my bridesmaids has very short hair. Another has quite long hair. The rest are somewhere in between. So it isn't that I want them all to have the same hair--I just want each girl to have some sort of retro flair to her hairstyle.


At the very least, every girl is getting a hair flower. I am planning to make these, in fact--have already made one. I'll post about doing that soon. The picture there on the left is really a little too elaborate--there won't be multiple flowers, just one--but it does give a basic idea.

I have been spending the last hour browsing The Bobby Pin Blog. Honestly, if I had the time or the patience, I would wear my hair like that every single day.

So, I'm not saying that I want to dictate everything. I'm giving people a lot of freedom. My bridesmaids are picking their own shoes, they're picking the cardigans they wear over their dresses... they each get individual jewelry and their own hair. It's just that I want them to choose that hair from a list of pre-selected options. Maybe spit curls to go with the hair flower for the girl with very short hair. I have at least one bridesmaid who I think would look spectacular with pin curls.

Still, part of me cringes at the idea of dictating things even that much. I'm torn between the age-old cry of the bridezilla ("it's my wedding! it's my day! I want it to look right!") and my constant reluctance to dictate anything to anyone.

Dolled up

I like to say I have at least one bridesmaid for every major epoch of my life. I have my two cousins, who I grew up with--one of whom is my maid of honor, and was the first best friend I ever had. I have my two college roommates. I have Dave's awesome sister. And I have a girl who lives on my hall now and connects to my college v.2.0 endeavor.

They are all great girls, with their own sense of style and their own unique and beautiful appearance. Trying to find something that looks equally good on all of them has been a little bit of a headache, especially because it's taken me a long time to decide what I was even trying to look for.

I originally thought bridesmaids in green with brown cardigans. Now I'm thinking dark brown dresses with cream or gold cardigans. It echoes the brown and khaki of the men's outfits, and the lighter colored cardigan will keep them from blending into the woodwork in the chapel.

Some inspiration:



How. gorgeous. are. those. shoes? I want a pair of them with a desire too intense for words.