These are my latest and greatest find! These are handmade, steel hairpins. Talk about heavy duty!
The longer my hair grows, the harder it is find ways of putting it up. I think I have purchased and tried every single hairpin under the sun, with no success, until now.
One day, at a friends house, she was putting up her daughter's hip length hair. Since they are the only people with hair as long as mine that I know, I asked her how on earth she kept it up. So.... she let me in on her little secret and I headed straight to the local Amish store to get them.
Now I don't know if you have a local Amish store or not, but ours is a simple little room on an Amish farm ran by a local Amish family. It isn't one of these high traffic, fancy, high-priced "Amish" stores where they sell a small bag of "bulk" food for $10 and a wooden bench for $300. This is a store specifically for the Amish, but they will sell to a few locals also.
We enjoy going in there. Good people and handy, handy stuff.
If you don't have somewhere to get such terrific and handy things, you might like to order a catalog that many of the Amish around here order from. It's full of canning equipment, stainless steel kitchen supplies, non-electric appliances, tools, heaters... and the list goes on and on.
ShetlersWholesale Co.
PO Box 8
Geneva, IN 46740
You will need to send them a letter requesting a catalog. Its been ages since I had to request such a thing through the mail, but they sent me one right away.
For any of you that participate in historical re-enactments, these hairpins might work wonderfully for you too!
We don't live anywhere close to an Amish community. We are always wanting to get things that we know we could only get from them. Thanks for the address!
ReplyDeleteI've never heard of steel hairpins--but it sounds like exactly what I need for my next reenactment. My hair is black though...do you think the silver steel will show?
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting!!
Mia
Mia~ could you maybe spray paint them with a spray paint for metal? I'm not sure otherwise, unless they are tucked away really well. I really think they'd work really well if there was a good way to hide them.
DeleteThanks for sharing your finds Sharon. I have long hair too but found some pins, kinda like 2 long bobby pins connected together at Walgreens. They work swell, but are a bit heavy & bulky...perhaps I should give your steel pins a try.
ReplyDeleteI wish we had an Amish store near us, there are a few Amish families north of us, but no store that I know of. I'll have to write Shetlers. We do have the Lehmans catalog, I wonder how they compare?
Thanks for the recipe too, I'll have to try it. It looks delicious!
How do you use the pins? Do you just push them in like bobby pins and they stay?
ReplyDeleteStrangely enough, yes they do stay, but you put them in a bit different. I couldn't figure them out at first so I asked my Amish friend how she got them to work. After she finished giggling at me, she took her kappa off and showed me. Her hair was in a bun and she grabbed an edge of the bun with the hairpin pointing away from her head. Then she twisted the pin as she turned it back towards her head and inserted it. I'm still learning because my bun is extremely heavy and very difficult to keep up with pins, but where there is a will there is a way.
ReplyDeleteThese pins are nice because they don't bend very easily.
You can purchase them from amazon http://www.amazon.com/Amish-Made-Heavy-Steel-Straight/dp/B00ACC4KPM/ref=sr_1_3?s=beauty&ie=UTF8&qid=1380663865&sr=1-3&keywords=amish+hair+pins
ReplyDeleteThere is always GVS of Versailles, MO. They are mail order. They are not on line but they have a phone number: 1-800-398-2494. EVERYTHING for the Amish and the Plain community. They have the pins and much, much more.
ReplyDelete