Object #1
Interview Subject: Nina Lourie
Object in Question: Hair Spirals

This Thursday Zac sent Nina’s hair spirals along to her in New York! Here’s a snapshot of the process he went through and the finished product; a maker’s interview, if you will:

Hair spirals – surprisingly difficult to describe, surprisingly simple when seen.  They’re like giant, loosely wound conical springs:

Winding springs is easy – just wrap wire around the right size rod.  If you taper that rod, you can wind conical springs – to a point.  Once the taper gets too steep or the spring too loosely wound, it’ll slip right off the mandrel, just like trying to tie a rope around the top of a pyramid.

The solution is to make a mandrel with steps that keep the wire in place.  This one was made out of a chunk of 4×4 pine too short to do anything else with.

Turning the cone on the lathe was easy, but marking and cutting the steps took many tries with a Sharpie and a steady hand with a die grinder & round burr.


I had some annealed stainless wire in the scrap drawer which was soft enough to wind around the mandrel by hand and just about thick enough to hold its shape through steady use and abuse as a hair accessory (If I make more of these for Nina or anyone else, I’d start with thicker wire, but this is what was on hand).  A quick zap with the TIG welder on both ends of the spiral gives nicely balled ends that’ll hopefully help give the spirals some friction in hair.

Sets of hair spirals, sanded & ready to wear!

Zac made three extra spirals, so this weekend we took some demo photos:

Because my hair is shorter than Nina’s, I like using three spirals. The extra one on top locks in the short bits of hair:

Nina, thank you so much for being our very first interview! We heart you and we hope you love your spirals, and that they go over fabulously at your office.

If anyone else would like to order a pair (or threesome) of spirals, drop Zac an email at zac@clockstonestudios.com. And yes, when you get them you can ask for a tutorial on how to put them in. We’re thinking they’ll be $6 each, so $12 for a pair and $18 for three. I’d personally recommend you get three if your hair is at your shoulders – for longer hair, a pair should work just fine.

Tomorrow we’ll be posting next week’s interview, which is with Jack Stratton of Writing Dirty. Yay!

P.S. Sorry, it looks like we’re fresh out of ponies.