Tudor Rose Bun

One of the gilrs that I live with has really long and lovely hair that I'm forever wanting to play with. She often lets me style her hair before a night out and I'm always saying that I would love to try one of my designs on her hair. I haven't actually put any designs on paper yet, however I have a mental list of things that I have been planning on attempting. Mimi's hair isn't very exciting to work with, its very thin, short and looks damaged, not to mention she is a very boring client, the converstaion is almost completely one sided. So I decided to try something different on my flat mates hair.

My inspiration for this desgin came from the Tudor rose. I really liked the idea of putting roses into hair but then I thought about maybe creating something that looked like a rose with the hair itself. Obviously I didnt really know where to begin so I started off by deciding wheether to create one rose or a few small ones. Considering the amount of hair that I was working with I thought maybe I should do numerous smaller ones but then changed my mind; thinking I should try conquering the task of creating just one to begin with.  I started by creating a twisted bun and trying to pull small sections of hair out of it in loops so that they looked like petals. As you can imagine the whole bun just fell pretty much completely apart. I thought about what I could do to the hair in order to create loops. When I used to work as a hairdressers assistant I often was given the oportunity to style little girls hair and the biggest request was 'princess' hair.  I did a lot of 'Elsa' plaits, curling, buns etc which is why I've been so confident during the practical lessons. One of the styles that I enjoyed creating was hair bows, it involved threading hair through the stitches of a plait and pulling it only partically through so that it looked like the ears of a bow.

 Above are hair bows that I created on my little sisters hair for my portfolio. The loops for this style dont look particularly like petals, also I feel that they would look messy when grouped closer together when trying to style them into a rose shape. However, this wasnt a completely useless thought as it reminded me of how loose some of the plait stitches could become when pulling the hair through the braid. I created a very loose plait on my models hair and decided that these stitches would be my petals. I placed the plait on the nape of the neck and wrapped it almost into a bun and it looked kind of like a flower, however it wasnt quite right. I played around with this idea and came to the comclusion that only one side of the braid needed to have loose stitches, so I created a plait with an average amount of tension and then pulled out the stitches on just the right side before securing it with a elastic hair band. Just like I had done before I wrapped the plait around and pinned it numerous times into position. I pulled it tighter in on itself, I pinned it in differnt places but it still didn't look the way I wanted it to. I pulled the singular braid out and created two plaits instead, each with a loose side of stitches. I wrapped one around the other and I was happy to say that it actually looked like a flower. It may not have looked like a rose specifically, however it did look like one to a certain extent, so I was rather pleased with myself.

I would definitely like to see what styles I could create using this technique. I'm sure I'll plan a design with these hair roses as an element at some point, as I think smaller ones would look impressive, as well as being elizabethan and contempoary in style.