Nina’s hair is a much better example of how hair spirals can rock with curls…She took photos in the park:
Then over the weekend she came over and we did another snapshot:
Pictures of Jack’s rack are coming tonight! Here’s a sneak preview:
Tag: Nina
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.
Interview #1
Interview Subject: Nina Lourie
Object in Question: Hair Spirals
Welcome to the first interview of The 500 Hammers Project, a weekly interview and creation process designed to highlight how useful, specific objects and tools can influence and improve our daily lives.
Our first interview subject, Nina Lourie, is a 20-something woman from New York who’s just started a new job at the Macmillan publishing company. She likes Irish dance music, hard cider, sexy musicians, fiddling with her napkins, ponies, kittens and lots of fabric in her clothing. (She didn’t tell me all of those things in our interview; I’ve known her over 5 years now.)
Nina works just down the road from me, so when I offered to interview her as our first subject for The 500 Hammers Project, we made plans for lunch. When it came time to meet up, however, at the bottom of Madison Square Park, I turned in circles for 10 minutes before giving up and calling her.
“Where ARE you?” I asked. A girl in a blue button down, a short grey skirt and a tight bun stood up from a bench not 20 feet from where I was standing, and as I caught her eye I laughed. I was looking for her hair. With it up in a bun and my tunnel vision, she blended right into the scenery.
Nina’s hair, as seen in her lovely photo, above, is the kind of brilliant red that makes your eyes burn if you see it in the sunlight. In her own words, when I asked about it over our Cuban food, “It’s all the way down my back at this point, maybe all the way to my bum.” (She’s English, by the way.)
For our first project, Clockstone Studios has offered to make Nina a pair of hair spirals, mostly because she’s dropped about a dozen hints so far as to how much she OMGWANTS them. But when I sat down and started to plan her interview, I had utterly no idea how to explain what a hair spiral is. So I asked her:
They’re spirals that hold up your hair by twisting into it instead of clasping it. They don’t do that clasping thingy where your hair is pulled by a single point of tension. Hard to describe, but they’re an easy way to create a nice, neat, classier look. You’ll edit this to make me sound more intelligent, right?
Okay, that’s a bit unfair. But hair spirals are a hard concept to master in words. Two pieces of heavy wire are twisted into shallow, cone-shaped spirals. The ends are finished, and the two pieces are twisted together through an uplifted bun to lock together, consequently holding one’s hair in place. Don’t worry; we’ll post pictures.
When I asked Nina about being a part of this project, she let me know that now was actually the perfect time for her; she’s just started a new job and is facing the challenge of wrangling her typical style of dress into something that works for her new office:
I need to find a way to take what I have now and keep that interesting, artistic look but still have a great deal of professionalism. The challenge is with fuck-off long hair, what do I do with it every day? I don’t like putting it up in a low bun that does nothing for me…the temptation is to leave it down, and I feel very much like something out of a fantasy print with all of my long locks flowing around me – but that just doesn’t work.
You’ve talked about how you’re now needed to adapt your style. Where did that style come from originally?
Hmm…probably it started because I spend so much time around theatre people, and because I spent so many years as a costumer, so I’m very influenced by that artsy style. I like nontraditional cuffs, bell sleeves, big flowing skirts…
And how’s that working for you now that you’re in an office?
It’s an interesting transition! My office isn’t all suits, but I do need to appear more grown up. I’m much, much younger than the people I work with.
Anything else?
My styles very influenced by my friends – that’s why I want the hair spirals, because [our friend] Gina has something very like them. I see things on a rack that I would never touch, but then one of my friends wears it and all of a sudden I’m thinking “Oh say, that’s actually really interesting – stunning, even.”
Our food came in the middle of the conversation, and I discovered that Nina had bent the straw for my lemonade into a full circle. “I can’t help it!” she laughed, “I have to fiddle!” And that’s true; one of my strongest images of Nina is from a few summers ago, when I found her sitting on a couch twirling one long lock of hair around her finger over and over and over again.
Last question: So what’s your new job, then?
Ha! Good question. Well, I work for Macmillan, but they’re not exactly sure of who I am yet. My title’s basically “Digital Piracy Associate.” Most of my work is to try and reinvent MacMillan’s policy on e-books so that they can continue to be profitable.
Thanks again, Nina! Come Sunday, we’ll post pretty pretty pictures of your new hair spirals. Hopefully they will put the question of what-exactly-these-things-are to rest.
Also we will include ponies.