half-up side braids

  French braids can be used in multiple ways. traditionally they pull all the hair together in the back, but today I am going to demonstrate how a side french braid can be extremely easy and something better than just pulling back your hair in a ponytail.

I started with the section of my hair that has part. taking the top layer of about half the hair I started a normal braid, then started adding small sections of hair back into the braid (normal french braid) this time i only used the hair from the section I started with, not pulling in hair from anywhere else so i got a continuous french braid down the left side of my face.  After I finished the section of the french braid I continued to braid normally until i had about 2 inches left of hair.  Before tying my hair off I made sure to include a little extra, allowing me to pull the braid a little loose. To do this I took the sides of the normal braid and pulled a little strand out, making the braid a little bigger, and the sides wider in diameter. Doing this just adds some more detail to a regular braid, making it more interesting.
After pulling out pieces from the regular braid I took both of my finger and thumbs and separated the stands in the french braid also, again just making a looser braid.
Once I have this braid done (which only took about 3 minutes to complete) I moved on to the other side of my hair, repeating my process on the first french braid. Again I pulled out strands from each side of the braid and french braid. Now with these two braids I pulled them to the back of my head and secured them with an elastic band, found in drugstores/grocery stores.
 To finish it off I used a 1 inch con air curling iron, and loosely wrapped strands around its barrel for about 10 sec each just creating small, loose waves. Since my hair is thick this took about half an hour to curl all my hair and make sure they stay.  After I finished curling I took Herbal essences tousling styling cream and only using a dime-sized amount, spread it over my hands and ran them through my hair, holding handfuls of hair at a time, then flipping it over and starting from the roots, scrunched my hair down to the ends.
All together this probably took about forty minutes (not including the time to stop and take pictures for the blog). One alternative to curling hair is using the tousling styling cream right after you shower and lightly towel dry your hair, you can take some of the cream and scrunch your hair, creating a wavy hair style in the morning that makes it a lot less time-consuming when you skip curling. Another use for the styling cream is for fixing stray hairs, especially the ones that tend to occur right around the front of the part.