April Wilkerson Talks Hair Management for the Workshop

YouTube woodworking super-star April Wilkerson has put up a couple of videos related to hair in the workshop. Yes, that’s right. Hair. It’s hot many places now and anyone with long hair, whether a man or woman, needs to keep it back for safety and to stay cool while working.

April shows you how to make a simple hair stick in the first video, and in the second, how to twist and pin your hair up into a bun using the stick so that it is both secure and keeps your hair contained. I don’t have any need for this anymore, but in my youth, I had really long hair and spent a lot of time in a woodshop and a printing shop where knowing this kind of on-the-job hair management would’ve come in handy. (I almost scalped myself one day in the print shop when my hair got wound up into the ink rollers.)

To create her hair stick, April started off with a piece of Zebra wood that a viewer of her channel had given her. Since she doesn’t have a lathe, she simply cut a piece to the desire width and then worked it on an inverted belt sander clamped to her workbench. As she points out, you’d think this might take forever, but it when fairly quickly. It was just a question of working the material to the desired shape and thickness that she wanted. She wanted a fairly substantial stick, so she didn’t have to work it down very far.

I love the little jig that April improvised to hold the stick while she finished it.

In this video, April shows you how to put your hair up in a tight and secure bun using a hair stick (you can also use a pencil).

First, you do a half-twist or a complete twist into a full bun, depending on how much hair you have and how tight you want it (e.g. if you want to get it completely off of your neck).

Stick the pin in from one side, say the right. Go down into the base of the hair, picking up a bunch of hair, and then come out on the left-hand side.

Then, make nearly a full rotation with the hair stick and come out the other side, pushing the stick all the way through the bun.

You can adjust the tightness of your bun by how many rotations of the stick. That’s it. Now your hair is up, safe, and secure.