A few weeks ago, I dyed my hair blue – not my whole head, but a fairly substantial bottom layer. The impulse to dye came not from a Clementine-esque desire to mark any major life change (although I’ll admit after reading the post, I pondered hair dye pretty seriously), but from feeling like I wanted to challenge myself – both aesthetically and, you know, in life. I wanted to get into the habit of doing things I didn’t think I could do. Hair seemed like a good place to start.

In the time since, I have learned not only that I should never underestimate the power of hair dye (and the Worn blog), but a few other things, too.

(And I do feel braver.)

10 THINGS I’VE LEARNED ABOUT HAVING BLUE HAIR

1. It looks nice with blue hats.

2. It stains my towels.

3. And sometimes also the tiles in the shower.

4. And my neck, at the beginning. And the collars of my shirts.

5. It’s a good way to make friends. (I continue to be shocked by the number of strangers who talk to me about it. I have met more people in my classes this year thanks to my hair than in the last 3 years of my degree combined.)

6. It looks really cool in braids.

7. It has dramatically increased the number of conversations I have about Smurfs.

8. It has also dramatically increased the number of times people serenade me with songs that have “blue” in the lyrics.

9. It has given me a (very tiny bit of a) reputation as a rebel.

10. It makes me feel tough. In some ways, I feel like it gives me permission to be tough.

What have you learned from your hair-dye experiences?

- Hailey Siracky

I have a serious case of born-in-the-wrong-generation. While I know that life in 2010 has its perks, there is a part of me that has always longed for things like handwritten letters, dances on weekends, and long drives in cars without seatbelts. This longing is never more evident than during the visits I have with my grandmother. Although I don’t see her as frequently now that I spend most of the year away at school, I try to visit as often as I can. My favourite conversations are the ones about what her life was like when she was my age.

One particular evening, we were talking about hair – specifically, the things we do to curl it.

“We used to stick a six-inch nail right in the fire!” she said, holding her hands up to show me how long the nail was. Later, she told me about how her mother used to make rollers for my grandma and her sisters out of paper: “If you twist and twist and twist,” she said, making the motions with her fingers, “the paper gets stiff, and you can wrap your hair around it.”


“We used to wear rag curls, too. Do you know what those are?”

I smiled. I am very familiar with rag curls. I spent many evenings with my mom standing over me, wrapping my hair around strips of old towel or t-shirt until I had knots of fabric dangling all over my head. I always began with the hope that afterwards, I would look a little more glamorous and grown up – but the process inevitably ended with my looking like a poorly groomed poodle instead.

In photos of my grandma as a young woman, though, she always looks enviably classy and composed – all soft smiles and mysterious eyes and the kind of grace that refuses to suffer the indignity of unkempt hair. After I left her house that evening, I was determined to give rag curls another chance. If she could do it, so could I.

All I needed, really, was a little patience. Rag curls involve wrapping sections of hair around a long piece of fabric, and tying that fabric in a knot to keep the curl in place. The end result is usually very tight ringlets. I’ve found, however, that putting your hair in curls when it’s dry, rather than wet, keeps them from being too crazy. It also helps to give yourself a lot of time for the curls to loosen. Instead of poodle hair (which I’m sure has its moments as well), I’ve started to end up with soft and lasting curls.

Rag rolls appeal not only to the part of me that wishes my hopelessly straight hair would stay curled for longer than five minutes, but also to the part that wishes I could have gone to dances every weekend and waited for letters in a mailbox instead of my inbox. I know that the past has flaws, but my grandmother’s generation is one that I still long to understand. My evening visits help me feel closer to my grandmother, and being able to relate to her stories about curls connects me, in the smallest way, to the girl she was before I knew her.

- Hailey Siracky

Gemma Correll is a UK based illustrator and creator of What I Wore Today (Drawings) - a favourite website of many a Wornette. Here, we chat with Gemma about outfit illustrations, zine making and tie-dyed leggings.

How did you dress in high school?
Well, at school itself I didn’t have a lot of choice, since we had to wear a uniform. But outside of school, I was into the “indie” style of tight band T-shirts and flared jeans- although I did also go through a hippy phase (tie-dyed leggings!) which I’d rather forget.

What is a typical workday like for you?
Well, it kind of builds up slowly. I am not a morning person, so I start the day checking my e-mails and guzzling coffee. After that, I run errands, walk my dog, go to the post office… After lunch, I’m ready to work. I’ll usually work from 2pm until 1am, with breaks for food, coffee and pug cuddles.

Shoes I Want / Good Hair

Were there any specific inspirations behind creating What I Wore Today?
I really enjoy looking at things like Lookbook and all of the Flickr groups where people post photos of their outfits, but I’m not so much into posting photos of myself online. So it made sense to draw myself in my outfits instead. It’s a good exercise in regular drawing more than a real desire to show people what I’m wearing (since I don’t have a particularly huge wardrobe or maverick fashion sense).

What do you believe to be unique to fashion illustrations that can’t necessarily be conveyed with an outfit photograph?
I think it’s to do with the style and the sense of self that comes through in a drawing. Photographs can get a little homogeneous whereas drawings show more of the person who drew it, whether they are an “artist” or not.

How do you decide which of your own outfits to draw? What makes an outfit illustration-worthy?
It’s actually more about how much time I have to draw. But I try to avoid drawing the same thing twice so it’s partly about that too. Also, if I have a new (to me anyway, since I buy my clothes mostly from charity shops) outfit I’m more likely to be excited about drawing and posting it.

You’ve also created a few zines – what is your favourite thing about zine-making?
I love zines because they don’t have a specific agenda. There might be a theme or a set size, but I draw them for fun rather than for work, which means I free up my drawing style and I’m more likely to experiment with techniques or media. Sometimes, I just have a lot of ideas that I want to get down onto paper, somehow and somewhere, and a zine is a great way to do this.

Gemma’s Top 10 Zine Makers
Mel Stringer
Craig Atkinson / Café Royal
Pacolli (Patricia Colli)
Ward Zwart
Will Bryant
Lizz Lunney
Kate Bingaman-Burt
Deth P Sun
Pikaland
Tom Gauld

- Hailey Siracky

For me, summertime has always been about projects. As the school year winds down, I begin to make lists in my head of all the ways I want to spend my time: I will read nothing but Jane Austen novels, I will photograph something every day, I will teach myself to sew. Sometimes I accomplish these things, and sometimes I don’t – but every year, I begin the summer with a hopeful bunch of plans and although I’ve never managed to complete them all, I’ve also never ignored my list completely. I may not do everything, but I always do something, and the break is a little more interesting because of it.

This summer, the project at the top of my list was tie-dye. I don’t know what possessed me. I’ve always been sort of indifferent to the aesthetic. I have owned exactly two pieces of tie-dyed clothing in my life: One was an oversized t-shirt I dyed at summer camp when I was seven, and the other was a pink and purple shirt I bought on sale on a family vacation last summer. I’ve neither loved nor hated either of these pieces of clothing. Sometimes a shirt is just a shirt. Multicoloured swirls and I had no real relationship - happy, sad or otherwise.

So how, on a Saturday evening in June, did I find myself crouched in my backyard, soaking a white t-shirt in a container of purple dye? I have no idea. But it happened, and it will probably happen again. I had so much fun.

The whole process was pretty basic. I took a cotton t-shirt, wrapped pieces of it in rubber bands, and then stuck it in a container full of RIT clothing dye. I ended up dyeing a few other things as well – the most exciting of those being a set of pillowcases, although I have yet to use them because I have a fear of waking up with my face all splotched with yellow and red and blue. I did my dyeing the cheap and easy way, but there are a lot of ways to get really serious about your hand dyeing, too. The best website I found while researching was this one which provides really detailed explanations of different dyes and fabrics and techniques (including one called Batik, which is a resist dyeing technique that uses wax).

I ended up with a pretty great shirt – and maybe by the end of the summer, I’ll have dyed a few more. But even though the clothing was kind of the point, the t-shirt feels like more of an added bonus to the whole tie-dye experience. I am happy to have a new shirt or two – but I am even happier to have had an evening sitting in the grass, my hands covered in dye, excitedly unwrapping freshly-coloured fabric and anticipating the results. With this project, I wasn’t in it for the clothing as much as I was for the sunshine and the laughter and the clothesline full of brightly coloured fabric strung up from the fence.

But, the clothes are cool, too.

- Hailey Siracky