New Baby, and a Link

Our daughter was born nearly a month ago, so we're just settling in to our new family configuration.  I'll be back here as I can, but in the meantime, here's a link that's relevant to our subject, and I'll add my own comments when I'm not typing with one hand,

Where Google Can't Provide

I've been working on some more historical headcovering posts- and I'm finding that this is one area where Google image searches, or Google searches of pretty much any sort, are not coming up with anything.  I think I've finally found an area too arcane for Google and the internet of 2013-almost-2014.

Pinterest has been a bit better, oddly.  I've found some great images there, by searching for the name of a photographer who took many photos of Jewish women in northern Africa in the 1930s, but there are several topics that I've done some writing about, and can't find any images.  (There were some excellent ones in the books I was using at the JTS library.)

It's oddly frustrating- here's this area that I'm interested in, and the internet actually can't provide for me.  (This is highly reminiscent of my luck with research projects as a kid.  My first research project in 4th grade was about the kibbutz, and the only sources I found between school and synagogue library were 1. a film strip, 2. a children's book for little kids, and 3. an adult book about the organization and governance of kibbutzim that was rather above my head.  Nevertheless, I wrote a 10 page paper- Lord only knows how.)

It's also strange to think that I'm googling images of a women's head covering that was still worn not much more than a century ago, and come up with lots of pictures of some sort of stuffed cabbage.  (Really. Truly.)

With those enticing thoughts, I leave you.

A Lovely Event

I had a great time at my first head covering event on Saturday night.  A lovely group of women got together, and we ate, and talked, and learned a little, had a small scarf-swap, and then got on to playing with scarves. I talked through some of the source texts that I've shared here, and spoke for just a couple of minutes about some of the observations that I've made about those sources.  And in our play, I got to show folks how to do several really pleasant styles, helped people use scarves that they were finding difficult to style, and we did some brainstorming together about using some bulky or otherwise tricky items.

The brainstorming was really special for me, because I wasn't just a guest expert- the community got empowered to play and experiment and create some lovely coverings together.  I loved to artistry that came out as we got going.

A very special aspect of the program, which I hadn't planned, was that one of the women who came is involved with a charity that provides head coverings (hats, scarves, perhaps even wigs) to women who are living with cancer.  So several hats and several scarves that didn't go in our swap will have new homes making life just a tad easier for people who could use them.  

I wish I had photos, but someone else took pictures, so I'll have to wait and hope that I can get some from her...  Instead, here's a recent photo of me with a hanging shabbos braid:

And in the end, we wrapped up (sorry for the pun) by putting a scarf on the shul's rabbi when he came to bring my husband and me to the bus station.  I think he found a Purim costume for this year (but not as a woman, I promise.)  

Of course, I forgot to mention this blog to them, but hopefully I'll eventually make the connection.  

Reaction: "My Kippah, Myself"

This article resonates with my own experiences.  It is one woman's description of her experiences wearing a kippah for the last 20 years, starting at age 9.  She shares some of the challenges she has experienced- and the theology and identity that lead her to make, and to continue to make, that decision.  It's worth the read.

I didn't start wearing a kippah as early as Gila Drazen did, nor as consistently- I often swapped over to a folded scarf or a headband.  But when I wore a kippah on the street (or at the grocery store, department store, post office...) I got the same reactions that Drazen did.  They were glorious and they were miserable.  They were, most of all, inescapable.  By the time I went to Israel, it's no wonder that I didn't have the energy for the infamous "Ben O Bat"?" (Are you a boy or a girl?) conversations that many of my friends have had.

Drazen's story reminds me of my own in so many ways.  There is no moment of definition- there's only her moment of recognition that she's known all along- the kippah her parents give her is sparkly, purple and Jewish, of course she was going to wear it all the time.  For me, it was an even earlier moment of "I'm Jewish", therefore- for me, I was 5, and I insisted that my parents send me to Hebrew School.  Her story resonates in its very lack of revolutionary energy.  There is nothing at odds with the Jewish life she already was living in this decision- it barely Was a decision.  It's only later, interfacing with the external world of the broader Jewish community and the non-Jewish world that it becomes a challenge.

I too had a conversation with a man in a black hat about my kippah- except I didn't get to have the conversation.  I was walking with two Jewish men (with kippot and tzitzit) and a non-Jewish woman, a Protestant seminarian, after an interfaith conference.  A man drove by, pulled over, and asked my male colleagues- "why is she wearing that?" I tried to answer- he didn't look at me, or listen to my answer.  "Who said she could wear that?" "Why can't she just bake challah and light candles?" My colleagues tried to answer him- they said what I might have said, only more politely.  Our Protestant company was passed by without comment, although she was wearing jeans, and a low-cut shirt.  But my kippah (over a dress and long-sleeve, high-necked shirt)- now That was confusing, and a threat.

It's a reminder that clothing can be about us as much as it is about our way of shaping how other people see us.  There is a connection between identity and identification, obviously- but the way that the kippah gets grabbed as a signboard can be very trying when one wants to send no message more controversial than Ï am a Jew who is in relationship with God".

In the end, Drazen's message is one I heartily approve of, even as someone who no longer wears a kippah herself- at least when you can see me:

My kippah is not about you any more than the rest of the way I present myself is about you. My kippah is about me, it’s about God. It’s about Judaism and family and tradition. You are not the official arbiter of what Judaism is or is not. I do not require your understanding or your approval; however, respect is appreciated. 

Have you had one of these experiences?   Are you curious about why women wear a kippah, or how they made that choice?  This is an open space for respectful communication about the topic.  Please share stories, questions, and answers.  Anything disrespectful will be removed as soon as I can.

A Comment Worth The Sharing: On Passing And Jewish Identity

Liz Shayne offered these thoughts as a comment on a previous post.  I found them really interesting, and from a perspective that was new to me, maybe since I'm living in New York City, where Jews are plentiful and pretty identifiable.  I thought it was really interesting and worth getting more attention.  I invite you to read on, and share your own thoughts and reactions in the comments section.  

"Visibility is...an interesting problem because I've found there's a difference between looking different and being visible as a member of a group. There's a strange space between passing and proclaiming identity where I look different from everyone else, but my surrounding culture lacks the necessary cues to identify me.

This is another sticky place between privilege and presence, because I look "stylish" when I cover my hair with a hat, especially when I'm wearing a beret/wool cloche during the winter. And even my headscarves pass for intriguingly retro or offbeat on the street. There are days when I want a large sign taped to the back of my head saying "This covering has religious significance for me!" and then there are days when I very much don't.

When I first started teaching, I only wore hats because hats, as Rachel says, help one pass. By the end of my first year, I was more comfortable wearing scarves to teach (and I was running an 8am section and taking my orals at that point so the fact that I got to the classroom with a lesson plan and my shirt the right way round was an achievement) and, over the summer, I deliberately wore a large, rectangular scarf on my second day as an odd kind of "this is who I am" statement.

But I never know if the statement I'm making is the same one other people are hearing (this has often been my experience with teaching, especially in the beginning).

So I value being able to pass because I am uncomfortable standing out without standing up. And yet there seems to be a lack of cultural awareness of Jewish hair covering as a recognizable form. This, I imagine, is because the how of covering has always been culturally determined and so Judaism, as such, does not have a distinctive style. We adopt the style of the culture around us and cover accordingly. And the current Western style of public hair covering is to not, which complicates matters and means that the current generation of Ashkenazi women (for the purposes of this conversation and making sweeping claims, lets say women under 40) find themselves in search of a tradition/stye of hair covering they can turn to and (assuming they have a job that does not mind scarf-like coverings) they, somewhat naturally, turn to the Israeli styles and modify them for the kinds of scarves and styles suited to the West…and attempt to avoid cultural appropriation in the process.

Do we fail to stand out because we pass or because we aren’t identifiable in the first place?" 

Adapting Hijab Styles And More

One of the things that I do (I think I may have mentioned it once before) when I'm feeling  in a rut with my covering styles, is to look online at tutorials and how-to videos.  And while there are more Jewish or similarly styled videos out there now then when I first looked around, there is a much wider variety of videos available for styling hijab.

Of course, many of the ideas don't work at all for someone not looking to cover their neck (and I don't wear styles that do for reasons of 'truth in advertising' and communal acceptability/sense of who I am).

But some of them do.  And others have ideas that are adaptable to the styles that I wear, with a little experimentation.

Here are a couple of general principles that I've developed, in figuring out what works for adaptation:
1. Anything that covers just the head, with instructions to "pin to a turtleneck" is obviously basically just a tichel style.  Just don't pin to a turtleneck, and you've got something immediately wearable.
Here's an example:

2. A lot of things that involve creating folds look nice, and I keep thinking they should be adaptable, but I haven't had much luck yet- most of them keep the folds with pins, and I'm not ready for pins.  (Are you?  How is it?  Do you get poked often?)

3. Wraps focus on moving around the face fabric comes around in front of you, covering the neck and perhaps chest as well) instead of around the back of the head are going to be inspiration, not directly convertible.

4. Hijab tutorials are great places to look for interesting color combinations, ways of tying scarves decoratively on the side (I've seen some great side knots on friends lately, actually.  Anyone want to fill me in?), or for ways to incorporate accessories.  They were the first places I saw good ideas for using headbands and pins.

And More:
I've joined Pinterest.  You can find me (and some of my favorite coverings I've worn, along with some items that I'm hoping will inspire me, and a small but growing collection of useful how-to and tutorial videos) at http://www.pinterest.com/mayaresnikof/boards/ 

I know there's a way to connect it to this blog, I just haven't figured it out yet.  Advice is welcome.

And just for kicks- what I wore one day recently:

I've been really enjoying layering ribbons on my wraps.  This patterned one especially adds to the sense of complexity without adding lots of bulk or bits that can cause the rest of the wrap to slip out of place more easily.  I'd guess it's a good technique for relative beginners who are looking to add interest without adding difficulty, since it's just wrapped and tied to itself on top of the rest.

My Fascination With Twisty Crowns Continues

I went to an outdoor wedding a while ago- a very good friend from college got married.  It was a picnic-style wedding.  So I was aiming for something that looked really festive, but wasn't too formal, and would put up with dancing, eating, hanging out, outside.  Most of my coverings are pretty stable, honestly, but it meant that adding sparkly things kept on only by bobby pins didn't have quite the appeal that it usually does for me.  Here's what I came up with:

It's made up of: 1 square scarf, folded into a triangle (blue with stripes) , 1 rectangular scarf (purple pattern), and 1 small square scarf (light green), roughly folded into a band.  

I put on the base scarf, and left the tails dangling.  Then I twisted the purple rectangle and the green square around each other, in the same manner as I do the tails for the twisty crown, (Wrapunzel has a how-to here) so that the middles of each scarf were together.  I tied that around my head, using up all the green scarf, but leaving tails on the purple one. 

I then twisted one blue triangle tail with one purple rectangle tail in the same fashion, and wrapped it over my head, behind the purple-and-green twist.  The purple reached about half-way around, the blue reached all the way.  I tucked in the blue tightly, and used it to secure the purple.  I then repeated the same thing with the other side, tucking under the first blue-and-purple combo.  I threw in a bobby pin in the middle to help keep things secure.  

I then added a small black and white headband to set off the two crowns.  

The whole thing stood up to dancing, pincnicking, hula hooping, and 3 young relatives.  

So You May Have Noticed Some Changes

The blog was starting to refuse to show me comments again, and I couldn't fix it (last time I just ignored it for a while, and one day they were back and functioning again), so I've gone to a different layout, which so far, seems to have fixed the problem.  

If you prefer the old format, tell me, and I'll make an effort there, but otherwise, I think this variation may be here to stay for a while.  

As for real content..

I was thinking about a question one of my readers sent me quite a while ago, that my life over the summer prevented me from writing about- "How did you make the decision to go from kippah to tichel?".  I went back through what I've written here, and found this post about my transition, written around my  first anniversary.

Another year (and a few months) later, I'm feeling reflective about how that change felt.  The decision making was very much the organic process that I wrote about there.  

What I didn't write about is that I'd already made a decision that I wanted to cover more territory once I got married than I did as a single woman, so as to have some "space" to communicate (to myself, mostly) that I was covering for multiple purposes now.  

I wasn't expecting to want to cover all my hair- I had been thinking about leaving my hair down under a scarf or hat, as my presumptive place to start experimenting from.  I'd seen women do that, and it looked appealing- frum but not too frum, not so different from my unmarried practice, but different enough.  Then I got married, and I found that covering more thoroughly really called to me.  I'm still figuring that one out.

The other aspect of the question is a little more vague- I was rarely a "kippah all the time" person.  I covered my head all the time- but I had some scarves that I wore, headband style (I know this isn't news to longer time readers), in place of kippot a lot of the time.  So it was more a matter of unfolding those scarves and wrapping them in different ways some of the time.  Maybe that's what made tichels so appealing to me- they were already comfortable pieces of my wardrobe and of my religious life.  

What about you- I'm curious about other people's experiences in developing their current head covering practices.  Did you make a transition in your covering when you got married?  At some other point?  I'd love to feature some of your stories here.  Please leave comments, or talk to me by comment or email about writing or expanding something for the blog.  

Looking for Input: Covering and Grey Hair

Dear Readers,
I recently read a post about styling grey hair, with a lot of thinking about whether or not to dye graying hair.  I was wondering if any of you had any input about how covering your hair impacts how you feel about or handle your graying or gray hair.

Comments or guest posts are welcome.  Comments can go here.  To guest-post, write me at mkosowsky @ gmail dot com

Seeing Yourself

A friend recently said that she saw my usual outside head-covered as my geeky presentation, and me with my hair down as a freer and looser self.  I'm certainly a geek- but...

My own image of myself is rather the opposite- my covering makes me feel adult and competent and a very different sort of pretty from how I presented myself with my hair down, which tends to feel rather innocent or young when I'm imagining myself.

Covering my hair often does give me that "I'm wearing a crown" feeling that motivational speakers and writers talk about.  I feel more dignified and adult, while also feeling beautiful.  I think I associate it with stories and historical pieces where only young women wear their hair down- married women, or really, adult women, put their hair up in various setting-appropriate hair-dos.

(What I happen to be wearing today)

Only my hair is quite slippery, and while it's very long, it lacks body.  And I've never had the interest in figuring out the mysteries of hair spray.  So up-dos have never been my thing, I never figured them out.  Not to mention that they are generally quite incompatible with a scarf or kippah.

In other words, covering for me is not only a religious choice, but also a powerful aid to my self-image.  I feel more confident, more beautiful, more capable.  It surprises me to hear that some people have the opposite reaction to my covering.  But I'm sticking to my guns- I'm not letting this disturb my vision of myself, I like it too much.

How do you envision yourself with your favorite style of covering?  

Head Covering as a Spiritual Practice: My Story

When I started wearing a kippah, it was a spiritual practice.  It made me more aware of my tefillah, it made me more aware of God's presence.  First, I wore a covering only when making brachot, studying, or eating.  The extra action made me more aware of each moment, of each blessing, of the presence of God.

Then I started covering all the time, and it brought a little bit of that awareness to getting dressed in the morning.  Whether I was wearing a kippah or a headband or a scarf, I was aware of having something on my head, and that would help me to remember why I did it.  It brought me more awareness of God, for a while.

It also brought me a lot of obnoxious questions and comments.  I've blogged about that in the past.  "You know that's not for keeping the rain off" about a kippah, and "when did you get married?" when I had a beret on outside, etc.  But the spiritual benefits outweighed the social annoyance, and the obligation to do education at any and all times, including while shopping for new bras.

However, over time, my awareness dimmed.  A kippah, or a scarf, or whatever I wore, just became something that I put on in the morning, just like a shirt, or socks.

And then I got married.  And I had a different awareness of what was on my head.  For a little while I was deeply aware of the double meaning of my new way of covering my head.  It was a thrill, because it reminded me that I was married (and of how wonderful my husband is, etc- I'm pretty sure that I was a quite typical newlywed).  It was also a reminder of the spiritual significance of covering my head, which I'd become sort of numb to.

Now, when I'm aware of anything, it's usually a social marker, what sort of Jew I look like.  And that's not nothing.  It is a part of my spiritual identity.  (Spirituality being generally defined as my connection to something greater than myself, to my community, to meaning, and to myself) But it doesn't help me remember God when I'm seeing a beautiful day outside, or when I'm spending time with the family of a dying patient in the hospital, or when I'm studying Talmud with my husband.  And that's an aspect of spirituality that I want to get from my head-covering practice.

So sometimes I think about that- and more often, I don't.  And I don't like that numbness.  That's Not The Point of this practice, or at least, not the only point.  I like that I look frum, I'm not going to lie about it.  But that's not the aspect of this that is foundational for me.

So I'm thinking about how to help myself remember.

Is covering spiritual for you?  In what way?  What keeps it fresh and meaningful?

Inspiration

Once in a while, I start to feel like I'm doing the same things with my head, over and over again.  I feel that way about clothing rather more often (I'm less experimental with clothes, especially work clothes.)  I just get bored.  I slip into the same style, over and over again.

And I have No ideas for what to do to change things up.

Whether it's a simple bun style, or a multitude of different layers, I get "stuck".  I need some new inspiration.

Sometimes I find that inspiration in blog posts, especially at Wrapunzel or Rivka Malka, or some of the hijab videos I find on youtube.  (Do any of you know of good covering-related websites with inspiring photographs?)

Other times, I find that inspiration after a week of dull wraps, and a half an hour of play and experimentation in front of my mirror, creating a variety of ideas that don't work, and one or two that do.

Sometimes I find inspiration in leafing through old pictures of myself, and noticing an idea that I used to wear all the time, then forgot about when I got excited about something new.

 Sometimes I see someone wearing something interesting at shul or on the train, that I want to check out for myself.

How do you re-find your inspiration?

P.S. And for an unrelated other sort of inspiration, because I saw it and loved it: How are nail polish and tefillin connected, and how could that possibly be inspiring?

Dreams

I had a dream last night where I kept either discovering that my hair was down and my head was completely uncovered, or that my hair had somehow escaped my scarf.  On the other hand, when I realized it, there was a scarf that matched my outfit (or so I thought in the dream) sitting on a bush right next to me, just waiting for me to put it on.  The rest of the dream was a funny mix of anxiety and utter randomness (involving a car that drives itself, a trip to a university to look at its dorms where we mostly looked at their bathrooms/changing rooms, and a very flexible cast of characters).

I don't think that I've ever dreamed about my head coverings before.  Has this happened to anyone else?

When You Hide Something...

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with some of my colleagues, and we were, for some reason, discussing hair.  I was mostly listening- I don't "do" my hair much, at this point (obviously).  Then one of my colleagues mentioned that I had beautiful hair (a surprise- I tend to think of it as very fine, and therefore mostly adept at escaping however I put it up)- and another woman responded: "How did you get to see her hair?".  (The answer?  We'd roomed together at a conference.)

I never thought of my hair as something secret or special, that other people would be interested in seeing.

I knew that my husband found it special that he was the only one who got to see my hair.  I'd seen women (well, college students) have this reaction to other women's hair.

But my hair?  What's the excitement in that?

Apparently, if you hide it, it does become special.  Even if it's your own- someone else will still find it exciting, even intimate.

I kept wanting to say- 'but I'm not hiding it from you!  You could see it any time, there's no problem in that.'  But it felt too odd.  Strangely exclusionary to the one man in our peer group.

I don't know what to make of that moment.  Brief though it was, it really surprised me.  I have now something special, off limits, that I never really thought about that way.  Making sure it was covered? Sure.  Feeling uncomfortable in boundary-stretching situations?  Sure.  Something other people were actively curious about?  Never thought in a million years.

Have any of you had a similar moment?  How did you feel about it?

Dealing With Awkward Comments

Every once in a while, I get an awkward comment about my scarf.  The latest (of a pretty small number) was  from a patient at work.  She said something like "it's too bad that you wear that- you're such a pretty girl".  I was a little surprised, but found something to say fairly quickly.  My response: "actually,  I find it very meaningful".

I'm not sure that that was the most useful pastoral response- in fact, keeping something focused on her would, I'm sure, have been better.  But socially, I think it was a pretty decent response, simple and to the point.

I've read, frequently, (and experienced some mild spin-off comments) about people who presume that one covers "because your husband makes you".  And for me (and most of the women I've talked to) that is very much not the case.  My husband is supportive of what I do- but would never have asked it of me, and would be equally supportive if I did just what I did before we got married, or anything in between that and this.  (The one thing I think he was once uncomfortable with was seeing me with a regular/men's sized kippah, before we were married, once.  And I don't know that that would bother him at home, any more.  I don't know.  It looks a little odd on me to myself, these days, honestly.  I'm not used to it on myself anymore.)

Do any of you cover (or modify your dress) because your husband/partner really wants it, when you don't or don't particularly care?

Follow-Up On Work Anxieties

After the concerns I wrote about before starting work, you might be surprised at the outcome.  Although I’d contemplated trying to make my covering less obtrusive, rather unsurprisingly I went into work in my usual sort of head-coverings, and have had no trouble or discomfort about them.   Neither supervisor seems at all taken aback or discomfited. 

It seems that I pinned my anxieties on an item of dress, when their concerns seem to have rested somewhere else entirely- in some aspect of scheduling or behavior that my dress indicated, rather than in the outfit itself.  I was even aware of that at the time of my interview. 

I don’t know why I fixated on my tichel as the source of their concern- in retrospect, it seems a little bit silly.  I suppose that I grasped onto the physical item that seemed the most Other, in comparison to secular American expectations, and tied all my worries about othering onto it.  A logical connection, but one that might have caused me more anxieties than I might have had otherwise, although there’s no way to know that for certain. 

We’ll see how patients react- I’ve only been really working seriously for a short time (translation: about a day), and so it’s hard to tell, thus far.  But I imagine that, given that chaplains, as religious professionals, are often expected to be marked in their dress in some way, stemming, I imagine, from Christian clergical collars, that a head covering won’t be such a concern.  In many ways, I’m more curious/concerned about how Jewish patients will react, especially the Hasidic population who, it seems, makes up a sizable percentage of the hospital’s Jewish population.  

Sowing Seeds

One of the women in the summer learning program I'm doing right now was in another such program (at a different institution) with me a number of years ago- the summer after year 1 of rabbinical school.  We hadn't been chevrusas normally, but learned together for a few days, when each of our usual chevrutas had been away.

At the time, I'd been wearing a lot of folded scarves as headbands, as my covering of choice.  I remember (now that she reminded me) talking about it together.

It turns out that she found the idea inspiring, and gave it a try- and has now been wearing a headband most of the time for some significant length of time.

I find the notion pretty exciting and inspiring myself- I love this practice, but never thought that simply talking about and explaining it might actually inspire anyone else to give it a try, much less for it to "stick" for them.

Girls and Kippot In The News

I know, I'm interupting my flow of Ba'kh, but I promise we'll get back to him.  In the meantime, I want to share these things.

I just came across this op-ed piece, from e-jewish philanthrophy, by Rabbi Elyssa Joy Auster, criticizing the Conservative Movement for not engaging with girls and young women at summer camp about wearing kippot.  The girls, when asked why they don't wear kippot, said "“It’s a boy thing,” or “The tradition is for boys to wear them,”".  

I also came across this response, from a young woman whom I met at one of those summer camps, Eliana Light, who has managed to integrate her egalitarianism into her practice in a thoughtful and committed way.  She writes that "a woman comes to more [traditionally male-dominated] ritual in one of two ways; she either gradually becomes more learned and aware and, either because of politics or person feelings or both, wants to take them on, or she’s just done them forever and never thought about it."  She also points out the importance of having role models.  


My own experience highlights the importance of all these factors- I grew up in a community where more women than men wore tallitot, and while more men than women wore kippot, women often did wear kippot.  Then I became more observant, and began an in depth exploration of the issues, I discovered much of what I am gradually sharing with you on this blog- that head covering in some fashion has long been part of Jewish women's observance, and that there is a pretty good set of textual reasons for doing so even before I married.  My role models included several women a few years older than me at my college minyan, as well as a rabbi or two.  (Also, a woman who turned out to be a friend's mother, later on, who I saw across a room with a tichel and a tallis, one shabbat.)  


But what really drew me in about Eliana's blog post was her attitude- that her egalitarian practice was both ideological and matter-of-fact.  She had done appropriate learning about her ritual choices, even to the point of choosing against wearing tallit katan because she had been doing it "for the wrong reasons" (a decision I feel quite ambivalent about, but that's off the topic- my interest in it here just shows that she has put significant consideration into her actions).  At the same time, they are also "just what one does" as an adult Jew- not something that has to be constantly justified or worked-over again and again.  It is a balance that I think is the real goal- to approach each mitzvah with serious consideration, but not to be trapped in that contemplation all the time, to the detriment of actual practice.  I seriously recommend her piece for that reason, if for no other.  

Weddings: The Bride

I spent some time, before my wedding, contemplating what I should do about covering my head at our reception.

I thought about leaving my veil on- but it was fairly large, and I thought it would get in the way of dancing.  (As to why I still had my veil over my face on the way Out of our wedding- well, I was too distracted to remove it, and no one else noticed.  In fact, it turns out that my husband kissed me under the chuppah through the veil...)  

I considered going bareheaded for the reception, but that felt very strange and pretty wrong to me.  I'd been wearing some sort of head-covering (kippah/scarf/cap/etc) for 6+ years by that point (only last summer), and  being at a significant event without one- especially when there would be eating, brachot, and divrei Torah involved- did not feel appropriate at all, for me.  So I ruled that out pretty quickly.

I briefly also considered finding a white scarf or crocheting a cap or kippah for the reception.  This would have made putting a hair-do together rather complicated, but it was my default option for a while.  (This would have been one more project for an already DIY heavy wedding.  I made the centerpieces, kippot for our guests, and sort-of-matching kippot for our immediate families, besides starting and not finishing an atarah for my husband's tallis, which was our huppah.)

Then I went to a friend's wedding, who also wears kippot/small scarves.  Her sister had put together a scrap of the lace from her dress (removed during alterations) with a shiny hairclip, and she wore that in her hair as a  kippah during her reception.  When she offered to lend me some things they had gotten for their wedding and weren't going to need afterwards, I asked if I could borrow that as well.  She was happy to loan it, and I did indeed wear that all day- I had the hairdresser put it on when she did my hair, and put the full veil over it, and only removed the latter after the ceremony.  It gave me a great chance to enjoy having my hair out for that last day, and also feel like I was covering my head.

 Here it is under the veil, at the chuppah.

And here it is actually serving its function, during the dancing.  

What did you do with your head/hair at your wedding?

Tichels and Tefillin

One of the more practically complex aspects to being both egalitarian and invested in head-covering is combining covering my head and putting on tefillin in a halakhically valid manner.  If you're not willing to show some amount of hair, this just can't happen in public, because the head tefillin -both the bayit and the strap- need to rest on your head, not on another object (a mistake I see on Purim just about every year, from people with wigs/hats as parts of their costume, who just aren't thinking about it.)

I manage it by pushing my scarf back just a little bit, so that the tefillin rest in the appropriate place, with the bottom edge just at my hairline.  Then I run my fingers around my scarf, pushing it back just enough so that the retzuah- the strap of the tefillin- is on my hair and not on my scarf.  Since I use kippah clips to keep my scarves on, I lift them enough to let the retzuah slide underneath them.  The whole thing adds about 5-10 seconds to how long it takes to put on tefillin, and doesn't muss most scarf arrangements too badly.

Some styles are better for davening in the morning than others- things like a bun style, braid, or pretty much anything that doesn't have much bulk on top will work with tefillin.  When I want to do my tichel in a crown or other top-heavy fashion, I often just either wear a large, crocheted cap/kippah (if I'm davening at home, which has been my default this year- hopefully I'll make improvements to my minyan attendance soon), or tie my tichel just at the basic level for coverage and leave the tails hanging until after I finish davening.

On the other hand, I don't know how to work this sort of thing with a hat with any sort of brim, unless you can take it off to put the tefillin on and put it back on over them.  So berets are doable with this system, but anything else gets tricky, unless you don't mind people getting a view of your hair, if you're in public.

Recap in step form:
1. Put on headcovering.  Expect anything with a lot of bulk around your head to get jostled off or get in the way.
2. Put on tefillin in the appropriate fashion.  When you get to the head, start putting it on, and say the bracha. Then:
3. adjust scarf out of the way of the tefillin in front.
4.  Run your fingers around the strap, adjusting scarf out of the way.  Settle everything in place.
5. Go on with putting your tefillin on, daven, etc.

After Davening:
1. When you come to remove your tefillah shel rosh (head tefillin), do so carefully, taking the strap out from under any clips or other obstructions first, for minimum frustration.
2. Touch up your tichel in any way you feel needed. For example: tug the front forward a little if you want, re-clip to tighten if needed, or put up the ends of your scarf, or additional scarves, to give yourself some height.