Countywide : Hair Blossoms in Fair’s Top Home Art

Golden flowers bloom out of a miniature pot, each petal a delicate lattice of looping threads.

Intricacies aside, these award-winning flowers at the Orange County Fair have another twist: They are made of hair.

The potted hair flowers created by Rebecca Money of Yorba Linda recently captured a blue ribbon at the fair’s Home Arts exhibit. Her floral hair wreath won a second place.

Money, 37, revived the lost art when her mother gave her a framed cluster of hair flowers that Money’s great-grandmother had made around the turn of the century. The antique red, blond and brown flowers inspired Money to learn the craft herself.

“My mother does a lot of genealogy, and other relatives give her their mementos,” Money said. “She let us children pick among them, and this is what I picked.”

Soon afterward, Money unexpectedly ran across an exhibit of hair flowers while on vacation in Dearborn, Mich. She took lessons there to revive her great-grandmother’s art.

Money had saved a two-foot-long braid she cut from her own tawny hair years before, along with two wheat-blond braids from her daughters.

She pulled strands from those braids to weave the fanciful flower arrangements she entered at the fair. The flowers look like shimmering doll curls, and are made by wrapping hair around a wire, and crossing that over a knitting needle.

Money said she is aware that, to some people, hair without a head attached evokes images of hairballs more than of home arts.

“Some people are really turned off by it, because it’s hair,” she said. “They think, gross! They think, because it’s hair, it’s dirty, but these days people wash their hair almost every day, so I don’t think it’s gross.”

Indeed, a century ago, it was very much the mode, she said. Then, women wove U-shaped wreathes of hair flowers to symbolize friendship. They collected strands from hair brushes and saved them in a special jar that used to come as part of comb and brush sets.

“It was part of the Victorian ethic not to waste anything,” she said.

A grisly variation, however, helped doom the craft, Money said. When grieving families began to display photos of the deceased to remember their loved ones, hair weavers hit on the idea of weaving funereal mementos from the hair of the dead.

It was not a marketing success.

But before then the craft was popular in China, Sweden and England, as well as the United States, Money said. The floral pieces she makes were a specialty of rope-making families like the one her great-grandmother came from.

“I kind of feel like I’m connected with [my great-grandmother] and kind of know her a little better,” Money said. “I almost feel like she made this possible.”