Yes, I’m still here…

Oy…so yeah… I’ve been quiet lately…silent, actually.  Why?  Stuff…things…meh.

So, when last I really posted, we were in hair cutting. It went well, tho I didn’t have my normal high grade.  And let me tell you why, this is a vent, warning.

At Empire, if you miss a test, you are not allowed to make it up unless you have a doctor’s note.  I missed a test due to a friend passing away…and I could not make up the test.  BULLSHIT.  Utter crap.  We are adults, PAYING for an education and sometimes emergencies that have NOTHING to do with a Doctor come up.  A friend died, dammit…died…and my grade is lower than it should be.  Not cool, Empire, not cool at all.  I am a damn good student, there every day and there early, I pay attention, respect my class and instructors…and yet, I miss ONE NIGHT and am completely docked for it.  I could have made up the hours, but not the work.  I am very upset this…more so than I care to put in my blog.  I will take my 82% and keep the rest of my thoughts to myself.  BULLSHIT.

Moving on…  Althougth hair cutting went well… I don’t feel like there was enough time in this section…but, it is what it is. I wish I had the money to buy a few more mannequin heads to practice on.  Oh well.

We are in skin care and make-up right now.  This past week we’ve done student exchange facials and massages.  Nice…very nice!!  This whole next week is Make-Up Application… FUN STUFF!!  A lot more involved than you’d imagine.  Learning how to use color, shading and highlighting to detract from and bring out features.  It’s pretty cool.

OH!!! I almost forgot!!!!  We had a holiday hair style competition and I took second place!!  I’ll post photo’s when I can!  I know, I know…I suck at posting photos!!

Okay… Wow..

So , yeah… I’ve been quiet.  There has been so much going on in my life the past few weeks that I could barely process it all.  Just to give you an idea…

Right before Thanksgiving I was informed that my temp job would be ending at the end of the year.  At Christmas.  Nice.  So for the past month I have been stressing over that and job hunting while working and going to school.

The first weekend in December was the last two performances for my band and between the two, one of our band members…while in my car, has a massive heart attack.  He died a few days later and we, the band, performed at his funeral service.  That was one of the hardest and most moving things I have ever done.  So, now we have job hunt, work, school, grief…

In the midst of all this, my Mom has been dealing with a mysterious illness that has effected her legs.  At first, they think MS…after much testing it is actually her breast cancer (from 7 years ago) that has come back metastasized in her bones.  My Mom has cancer again.  Seems weird to wish some one had MS…  So…now…job hunt, work, school, grief, and worry beyond reason….

And now I have a cold.  : (  ::whine::

BUT…this is a blog about school…not for me to whine about my life!  HA!!  So, how’s school…?  School is great.  School is my haven…my place to get away and it gives me things to do that totally occupy my brain, leaving no room for the other crap.  School is wonderful.  I love it.

We are still in the hair cutting section, but not for much longer.  I’m holding my own, but do NOT feel ready for this section to end.  I did a good job on all the cuts first time thru (except the 90 degree…which I got the hang of at the END of the cut…did fine the next time we did it).  I just don’t feeling like doing these cuts once or twice makes us even vaguely ready to be on the floor.  It kinda sucks.  It feels very assembly-line…which makes me sad.  I totally understand there has got to be some sort of time frame involved, but spending a wee bit more time on the hardest thing we do…and less time, say…putting in roller sets…would be a very good thing.  I feel like I got WAY more practice at rollers than I do with cutting and that seems ridiculous to me.  ::sigh::  What do I know, I’m only a student…?

No photo’s for you….never remember to take any.  I suck.  LOL

We are having a Holiday Hair competition at school this coming Thursday…so I promise to take photo’s then!!!!!

You will prolly not hear from me until after Christmas, so I wish everyone a merry and a bright holiday!!!

Be safe and be fabulous!

Happy Holidays

Hi all,

I’m still here, school is still wonderful and makes me happy…but, my life is kind of not-so-smiley at the moment.  I’m not gonna whine about everything that is going on (a friend died,  my Mom has cancer…again and I will be unemployed again on the 21st). 

I really just wanted to pop on here and wish everyone a wonderful holiday season…  Be safe, be creative and be gorgeous!

If you can’t be normal, be FABULOUS!

Love and Snips,

Heather

Snippity, Snip, Snip…

Okay, so last week was rough for me…not at school, but emotionally rough.  We, the hubbyish and I, are still adjusting to me being away from home so much.  Most of the time, like 98% of the time, we’re good…but emotions kinda boil up once in a while…take you by surprise…and all of a sudden, this thing you’re doing really sucks.  But just for a bit, then it’s fine.  So, last week was one of those, “is it really worth it?” weeks for me.  This week… I’m ready to rock ‘n roll!  : )

 So we have finally entered our haircutting section, as I reported a post or so ago… I was scared to death and excited.  Still am, but now the excited far outweighs the scared!!!  WHOOT!

Last week, Thursday I think, we got to play with our scissors after days of book work. Multiple days of book work in a row makes my brain mushy and my hands twitchy.  I, IMHO, think we should do something with our mannequin every day.  Even if it’s just at the end of the night and we take 10 minutes to practice sectioning and parting or airforming….something…just let our hands do something every day.  Just my .02 USD, YMMV.

Anyhoo, back to it…so the end of the week we got to play with scissors.  I didn’t really know how they were going to get us some practice cutting in without mangling our mannequins…  Hair wefts….stapled…(gasp!!!) to the back of Courtney’s neck.  Yes.  I agree.  BRILLIANT!!!!  And kinda funny…a whole lot of funny actually…see:

 This is before we had cut any of it….it’s still a mess from being rolled up in a little baggie.  It looked much better when I was done.  Honest…it did.  Hmm…wish I had taken a photo of “after”.  Oops!  We practiced cutting a stationary guide, then straight lines (hort, vert and diag) and convex and concave cutting.  All on our little stapled wefts!  LOVE IT!  When you’re done, just pop them off the mannequin and no harm done!  Awesome!

Then last night we actually got to take 10 minutes at the end of the class and cut the base line on the actual mannequin.   SQUEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!  It was made of awesome and I did very well, didn’t need to fix it at all!!  Cheer me!!!  : P”"

::sigh::

Please tell me it will all be worth it.

Bye Bye Curling

Our second 6-week block is done and done!  I didn’t know, for a while there, whether I was going to survive Perms & Roller Sets. LOL  They almost killed me!  But I DID survive, here I am and I ended the section with 101/97 Attendance/Academic.  Not my perfect 100/100, but I’ll take it. ; )

Last night we welcomed 6 shiny newbies into our pre-salon class…  We got them squared away with their kits and then went over mannequin care; washing, parting and airforming (blow drying).  We are starting the 6-week block for haircutting. ::shudder.shiver::  I am excited and scared to death!!  No, seriously…once you cut hair off, you can’t put it back on!!!  Ack!!  I am really excited tho, it finally feels like we are getting somewhere!  Not that what we’ve done doesn’t feel like something, but I am tired of curls…first with the curling iron, then with perming, then with roller sets…  There is nothing wrong with curls, but I’m ready to move on.

 I have photo’s….not great photo’s, but photo’s nonetheless!!

These are both from the roller set section, one is from a night we got to do a creative up-do of our own choosing…anything we wanted to do…  I have very little experience with up-do’s, frankly.  My hair has just gotten long enough to start playing with and I had pixie-cut short hair for 10 years…just not a lot of up-do experience here!  So, I did something simple, learned a bit…and will certainly try something more daring next time!

Without further ado…  I give you Angel’s Up-do #1.

 

 

For the one below, we had to do a roller set and pin curls for our final test in the roller set section.  She went over the list of what was required, but I somehow missed that we had to produce a final style out of it all.  So, I blocked all my requirements out.  Meaning, Tiffany was sectioned into four parts, I did one quadrant of pin curls, one quadrant of on-base rollers and then split the back two quadrants into half horizontally (instead of the usual vertical split) and did the top half in 1/2 on-base and the bottom half as full under directed.  No real plan…just rolled them up.  When I was completely done is when I realized that we had to dry and style her.  Oh crap.  So, not having enough time to completely re-do, I just went with it.  After drying it, I pulled it out and just dug in.  It’s the best roller set style I’ve done and it was an accident.  LOL  Figures!!! 

 

Both ‘do’s could use some refining…a lot actually…but I’m still getting the knack of working on someone elses hair…it will come.    : )

Trial & Error

I struggle with my hair daily. It drives me bonkers. It’s so straight and fine, yet heavy and dense at the same time…that it just doesn’t want to do anything except hang there. It won’t hold curl, and shows layers in a bad way, it has almost no texture on its own. I watch tutorials, read magazines…follow style blogs… I try new products, have cut it short then grown out that pixie cut into mid-back length hair… I try what I can to make my hair do something other than the whole ‘limp and lifeless’ gig it seems to love. As school goes along, it is making me a little less bonkers… I guess I’m learning.

Confession:
When I started cosmetology school, I had an assumption. I assumed it would be easier to do someone elses hair than my own. It had to be, right?? Yeah…nooo…

I was wrong to assume that. This is tough…harder than I ever thought…and a lot more technical. But it is also a ton of fun. I have never had such a good time in school. I love what I am learning even if it makes me want to poke my eyes out on occasion. This is work…it will be my work…so work on it, I will. I will get this. It will not beat me.

One of my biggest hurdles here is getting over myself. Things that are creative and that are “hand work” come easily to me…they always have…but this is giving me trouble. I am quickly learning that just because things normally come easily for me doesn’t mean that everything will. I’ve been struggling with the whole roller set thing. It’s so damn fiddly!! I mean, I can knit with five needles and multiple yarns at one time, but I can’t do a damn roller set…??? WTH?? My frustrations comes mostly because, in the book, they show all the roller set styles on actual people and not on a mannequin… No matter how hard I work, Tiffany will never look like those photo’s…so it’s a little hard to tell if I’m actually doing it right…make sense? The instructor can say, “that looks good”…but it doesn’t look ANYTHING like the photo….so, what gives? I dunno. It may just be me…but when I look at a tutorial and it shows a “finished product” I want MY finished product to look like the photo… But in this, it doesn’t seem to work that way and that makes me a little nuts.

Last night was fun tho… We got to do a student competition for roller sets. I knew I wouldn’t place, my sets just aren’t that good…and as for styling roller sets…well, I have a lot of practicing to do!! I forgot to take a photo of what I did, but that’s okay…you really don’t need to see that! LOL I even had a plan for the style, but I don’t know enough yet about how curls react (having my board straight hair, ya know…not a lot of curl experience) so I had rolled them wrong for what I wanted to end up with…and it didn’t cooperated. ::shrug:: It’s okay…it’s called an education for a reason! ; ) Practice, practice, practice!!!!!

Happy weekend, all!

Another week gone…and another begins…

I have finally gotten used to my schedule…in almost a bad way. Now my body has adjusted to getting home later and it doesn’t want to do the crash-and-burn routine as soon as I walk in the door. Now, it wants to stay up for a while…which makes the 5am alarm hurt even more… Like last Thursday night…I was still awake at midnight…then 12:15…12:30…and the alarm loomed ever near… I almost cried when the when it off!! At least it was Friday!! LOL Sometimes I really hate being a responsible adult. Yes, there are benefits…but, to be a kid again and to know enough to appreciate it…oh yes, please!!!

So, how school going…? Not bad. I’ve gotten so abysmally behind on my notes that I am gonna go nuts trying to catch up. I WILL catch up… I always do, but this time it’s gonna take some serious time!

This section started out a little sleepy, but last night was fun… Ms S. warned us that the first two weeks of this part was mainly book stuff…and so it was… ::yawn:: We’ve worked on the mannequin, Tiffany, (you’ll remember her from permanent waving) a few times…once to go over washing/drying, once we did a hairstyle of our choice that demonstrated different elements and dimensions, curves and lines and then last night to start to play with roller sets. Last night we did different roller set shaping, and it was graded…back up to 100% for me! Yay! So, yeah…lots of reading out of the books the first week…a little hands on…it’s all good!

Tonight we are having a pep rally of sorts…and a little friendly competition in class. Back at the beginning of this section, Ms S divided us into two groups and we had to come up with a salon name and organize ourselves into “Owner”, “Manager”, “Accountant” and “Employees”… I’m “Owner” of Mirrors & Shears Salon. Since both teams have one guy in them, tonight we are doing complete styling on one guy and one girl in our “salon”. Our team picked the colors of Hot Pink and Lime Green…since our guy, Tony, is wickedly punky-fun…it suits him perfectly (his two favorite colors, actually). We are going punk-tastic on him and classic fem on Syia (pronounce: Sigh-ah). I am gonna do Tony’s make-up..and help with the hair. I was going to do the hair, but since I really have NO experience working with someone elses hair yet (I know…what??)… I turned that over to Shannon, who has already been out on the floor and has working experience… I’ll assist her. : ) When we’re all done, the other students will vote…one from each team will win, then they will vote again and one salon will come out on top!! It will be fun, no matter who wins!

DONE, dammitall.

Who woulda thunk it that my 100% average would be sunk by permanent waving??? A freakin’ perm?? Really..?

Perming was a two week section and there were four scored parts…I got 90/93/100/95%. Still not too shabby, but ugh!!

So, what happened?? The wrapping for perms is harder than I imagined…and makes your hands and wrists hurt….and my purple rods suck…the caps kept popping off and driving me bonkers….only on the purple ones…the rest were fine. Bloody bastards…slowing down my time. That’s what really sucked…being timed on it. We had 30 mins to 9-block section and wrap the whole head…30 mins to get full points. 31-60 mins was docked 10 points…over 61 minutes lost 15 of the possible 20 points. I finished in 59 mins, 58 seconds…yes, right before she called the 60 min mark. Timing that way sucks…it makes for sloppy wrapping (which you also lose points for). They even admit in the real salon world it may take you 2 hours to wrap the head…it all depends on the client’s hair…no one times you and expects you do be done in 30 minutes or less. The timing is unrealistic, no one…not one person…finished in 30 mins or less… I wasn’t the last person to finish, at least…but ugh and half. I am glad the perm section is DONE!! (for now…remember, this is just the basics of everything..when I get to senior level we’ll go over it all again, on an advanced level)

Next week we are starting the “Principle’s of Design” section…a four week part. From what I have heard it involves roller sets…not sure what else to look forward to in this section, someone mentioned up-do’s…but I am excited!!!! And aside from the liquid styling tools, I am finally going to do work on hair not involving chemicals!!!! YAY!!

Note to self: really got to remember to take photos!! The final perm we did on Tiffany was cute…actually… Not “poodle” at all!

I’m thinking of buying a mannequin for home practice, so I don’t have to haul a head home with me and I don’t have to worry about forgetting it or messing it up… I wish they made mannequins with exchangeable hair…like you buy the head and can snap on different hair… Want to do an up-do?? Snap on the long hair! Want to practice relaxing?? Snap on the curly hair!! Perms?? No problem!! Snap on the straight hair!! Hmm…someone should get on that… I smell BANK!!

YAY ME!!!!

So my first 6 week section of class is done!! I’m so happy and proud of myself for not only committing to this life change but to actually loving and doing very well at it!!

Empire does this thing, which I think is pretty cool… Classes are broken up into six week sections and after each section they hand out awards for students excelling in class. There are two areas in which to earn awards.

One is attendance: you can either earn Perfect Attendance or Excellent Attendance (excellent or something like that)… Perfect Attendance is just that…you are there 100% of the time, no tardy days, no absences. Excellent Attendance means you were in class between 99-97% of the time. Even being a few minutes late one day will knock you out of the Perfect category.

The other area to earn an award in is called “90/90”…which means you have earned at least 90% Attendance and 90% in Theory/Practical. Both sections earn a paper award and a pin for your apron. The 90/90 also earns you the right to wear any clothing you want on Thursday (within reason, of course…still no jeans or logo shirts, nothing risqué’ or sloppy…you still have to look professional). The standard Empire student attire is solid black or solid white; no jeans, no logo’s, no patterned clothing (i.e. I can’t wear a black and white striped shirt). It gets boring, to say the least.

So this past Monday when they handed out awards, I earned a Perfect Attendance and my 90/90 (I actually had 110/100%, but who’s counting)!!! YAY ME!!! I have my paper awards (yay) and my two pins for my apron (yay) and most importantly (for me anyway) I can wear color on Thursdays!!!!! (YAY.YAY.YAY) I’m just a wee bit happy about that, can you tell?!

I do find the “no jeans” part a bit annoying since most of my bottoms are of the jean persuasion (the bottoms I would be willing to wear to school anyway). I need to hit the thrift store and get some non-jean bottoms on the cheap that I won’t be out $50 if I get perm solution and hair dye on them! I certainly don’t want to chance getting stuff all over my nice suit pants! I also need to pick up a few cool weather layering tops… I am of the opinion that they think the school is a Fridgidaire!!! I am always freezing if we are working on theory (book work) and a little warmer (read: comfortable) when we are doing practical (mannequin work).

So, what have we been working on this week?? We started our Permanent Wave course and we’ve been practicing the rod wrapping and placement all week. My fingers and wrists are so sore!! (and my feet/knees from standing for hours…not used to that anymore) All that wrapping and rolling and using my fingers in ways I’m not used to have made them pretty tender! I remember when I started knitting, my hands got sore, too! I’ll get used to it, but right now Advil is a good friend of mine!

We are also using a new mannequin now, her name is Tiffany. Say “hello”, Tiffany…

(again…not MY Tiffany, just a photo off the website…but mine looks just like this one)

Tiffany has super fine hair (much like my own)…but she has much less hair than me. I have super fine hair and a lot of it (doesn’t amount to much cuz it’s so fine…my pony tails are still wimpy). The fine hair makes for easy rolling, but egads… We’ve 9-block sectioned-wrapped-removed-9-block sectioned-wrapped-removed so much I think I’m gonna die!! Last night we had to 9-block section and wrap the whole head and it was graded. But by last night my hands were so tired and sore that I was moving pretty slowly and I didn’t finish in time. (about 6 of us didn’t finish) She’s giving us time on Monday to complete it so we won’t lose points!! WHEW!!! I’m only about 10 rods away from being done…prolly only another 10 minutes worth…but we ran out of time last night. I’ll be bringing Tiffany home at some point to practice so I can improve my time…that’s for sure!

We haven’t actually DONE the perm part yet…just practicing the rod placement. The stinky stuff will happen this coming week. Ew. : )

Oh, and I’ve changed my hair for the Autumn months…(I’ll post a photo when I can) I just got a tiny trim off my blunt cut back, but I got some slight shaping around my face and got my bangs deepened and blunt cut just below my eyebrows. Now the color…oh, I am loving it!!! I got a super dark (almost black) brown with violet purple “chunks” in it… I use “chunk” for lack of a better term. I don’t have huge obvious streaks of violet in my hair… It’s very understated, but you can see it when the light hits it. I did, actually, want it to stand out a bit more…and she said it will when the brown fades out a bit… But, over all… LOVE.LOVE.LOVE!!!!

What’s been your favorite hair cut or color?? Something you’ve always wanted to try but been afraid to??