Blogidays Day Ten: Halter Raffle Follow-Up

Earlier this week, I got my most favorite kind of email: one with pictures of my tack in its new home!

Angelique received her raffle halter this week, and was kind enough to send me some stunning pictures.

First of all, that's just such a gorgeous horse. Second of all, am I the only one getting a serious ethereal feel from theses pictures? Love it!

So soft and glow-y. Thank you so much Angelique! I hope you enjoy!

This is seems like a good time to remind any of you out there with my tack that I love, love, love getting pictures of my tack on your horses, whether at a show, in your home, or even on a tiny saddle rack. It's fun to really see that it doesn't just ship off in the mail and evaporate! 

Blogidays Day Nine

Today was another out and about, non-horsey day for me, so no really exciting updates to share. 

Instead of a real post, I thought I'd share a link I've been loving lately- Equestrian Reality is a hilarious blog that any horse person can definitely relate to. I did a lot of giggle-snorting at her "People You Are Likely To Meet In A Stable Yard" post, but my favorite is her "Lady's Guide to Preparing to Hunt Side Saddle in Ireland." 

Downton Abbey spoiled me.

It's been a long-time dream of mine to create a Stablemate scale UK fox hunting performance entry, and her blog is a treasure trove of reference! 

Just under two weeks left to enter the holiday raffle! We're so close to our next goal, which could mean either TWO goats for families in developing countries or healthy school lunches for a school for a month. Either way, keep it up!

Blogidays Day Eight: Stirrups Tutorial

On the eighth day of Blogidays my true love gave to me... a guest post! 

When this posts, I'll be out Christmas tree hunting and will definitely not have any studio news to share, so Anna was kind enough to help me keep up the Blogidays roll. 

This is a perfect topic for those of you wanting to try out mini tack, but not sure you really want to invest a lot of cash into it yet. Take it away, Anna!

Make Your Own Stablemate Stirrups

For as long as I can remember, I've alway thought - Why buy it when I can make something almost as good myself? This mentality has lead to everything from trying to knit my own socks to horror story quality customs. 

However, this idea stubbornness works well when what you're trying to make is so small, most people probably won't be able to see it very well anyway (at least this is what I tell myself).

I'm growing a garden of stirrups

That said, I have never found the appeal of spending many dollars on itty bitty pieces of metal that will just hang from my saddles. They're barely seen. I mean, I already made the saddle... so go big or go home, right? Right?

Note from Grace: These are the cast irons I
use from Horsing Around UK

I've been using this method of stirrup making pretty much since I first started making saddles for the stirrups to hang from. It works well, and I've learned to make them in batches of 10 or so pairs so I can feel surprised when they're already there and ready for me. (It's the little things.)

You'll need:

• Tin Snips
• Some nice thick-ish wire. I use the green botanical stuff from Michael's 
• Needle Nose Pliers
• Scrap Leather (any color) 
• Silver Paint
• Some Color Paint
• Scissors
• A saddle/horse (optional - for figuring out stirrup size) 
• Silver Sharpie (optional... kind of)

I start off by cutting off a good length of wire. Better to waste a little than find out your piece is too short in the middle of a stirrup.

Take those handy needle-nose guys and grab the wire so that theres some on either side. 

After doing this enough I was smart enough to sharpie-and-clear-nailpolish a mark on the pliers so I would always get the same sized stirrups. I highly recommend doing this once you find the place on the pliers that gives you the right size. (up until then it's just trial and error) 

Fold the short piece of the wire over the top of the pliers like so:

And then take the longer piece and stick it straight up along the side of the pliers.

Next, use your thumb nail or tweezers to fold over the long piece not quite against the pliers but so that it makes a little loop over the top of the short wire piece. 

Here's a handy diagram:

Next you'll fold the short tail across the flat inside part of the pliers and squish it flat...

And then repeat with the long part of wire.

Another handy diagram:

In reality the two short pieces across the bottom will be next
to each other, I drew it like this so you could see both easier

Wiggle it off the pliers, clip off the extra short end, and tada! The skeleton of a stirrup is there! I always leave the long side attached until the end so I can paint/glue things without touching the actual stirrup. 

This is where, if you haven't found the perfect size of stirrup yet, you can compare next to a saddle or horse. 

If it looks all good, you can add some silver paint. Go ahead and apply it pretty thick and in a few layers. This helps to "seal" the little valleys between the wires, and make the top where the leather will thread through more realistic by closing up some of the extra space. 

Keep something squishy nearby to stick the stirrup into to dry after painting it. 

Notice how I made the top loop bit a little
smaller with the paint

Next, take that scrap leather and cut a little rectangle big enough to fit snuggly inside the stirrup, but not so big it rides up the sides. (I guarantee you'll get it wrong and have to fix it. I have never gotten it perfect on the first try and if you do it's probably through dark magic or something.)

Using super glue or regular tacky glue, stick it to the inside bottom of painted and dry stirrup. I prefer super glue because my interest in any given thing is about as long as it takes super glue to dry, which means if I don't use it here I'll most likely put the stirrup and glue down to dry and never pick it up again. But, if you have a fear of moving too fast or commitment in general, tacky glue is the way to go. (Tell that to the next person you date: "I'm sorry but I feel like I really just need to be tacky glue with you right now")

Anyway, after that you're free to paint the little grip pad whatever color you like! White and black are traditional of course, but because this stirrup is only for the tutorial and I'm an adult and can do as I please I've gone with red for the holidays! 

Classy!

This is where a silver sharpie really comes in handy. Undoubtedly you will mess up the colored paint just a little, and instead of going back and forth between accidentally putting silver on color and color back on the silver as you try to fix it, you can just take a silver sharpie and gently poke it over where you messed up with color. Easy peasy! 

Finally, just trim off the long tail and silver-sharpie the green tip. 

Done!! I love these guys because a) I don't have to wait for shipping ever and b) the cost of all the wire and paint and leather I bought that can make hundreds of them probably cost as much as two pairs of the cast guys.

Let me know if you try it and this method works for you! I hope it will help some people like me who refuse to buy certain things. I'd love to see what you guys make!

Grace again: I'll pass along any comments or questions you guys might have right to Anna! And be sure to check out her blog and Facebook page if you haven't already.

Blogidays Day Seven: Booty

Most of my day was spent making boots. It wasn't too exciting. 

However, I took breaks to make a mess on the customizing side of the table...

Working on this guy.

My customizing skills are quite rusty, but it was a fun little project despite his flaws.

I also laced more reins...

...to finish the hunter bridle. 

The customizing kick got me looking at this guy again, who the eagle-eyed might remember from a post over the summer:

I have big jumper dreams for this guy. 

Maybe it's time to finally get him some clothes?

And a proper stand?

And hey, if I'm going to be painting, it's high time my poor donkey got some color. I'm thinking some kind of pinto pattern... what do you guys think?

Blogidays Day Six: Lace with Grace

So I've talked about lace a lot on here before, but today I had to make a new batch and I thought it could be fun to actually show you the process!

I take zero credit for coming up with this method- it's all Anna Kirby genius. This whole process took just under half an hour to actually do in real time, but I thought a sped-up video might be marginally less boring.

I think the video format is a really cool way to do tutorials, and I had a blast making this- what do you guys think? Helpful?

I'm dashing through this order, which might leave me some time to do a sales set before Christmas... an English saddle video walk-through could be a possibility? Maybe?

Hope everyone is enjoying the season!

Blogidays Day Five: The Other Cool People

Continuing down memory lane/slow news day... 

If some of the pictures seem random, that's because they are. Nothing got done in the studio today and I don't really have any relevant pictures to go with some parts of this post, so enjoy some random pictures from the past two years or so, just purged from my ancient phone.  

Over on the right side of the blog you've probably noticed a little list of links titled "Other Cool People." Those aren't just interesting blogs- each link has earned its way there and has little anecdotes behind it. So let's spread some love, shall we?

Ebb & Flow Studios

Anna. I feel like I talk about Anna almost every single blog post, but she's worth it. Hands-down my favorite human, partner in crime, and talented tackmaker to boot. I could wax on about her forever, but I'm going to leave it at that because I'm sure I'll be doing plenty more loving on her in the future.

Braymere Custom Saddlery

I know I'm not alone when I say that Jennifer Buxton is the one who inspired me to start blogging in the first place. I can't even remember how I first stumbled upon her blog some five years ago, but as soon as I did I was struck by how clean, visually appealing and genuinely interesting her posts are. A visit to Braymere is as much a part of my daily routine as mealtimes are, and I'm never disappointed.

The first full mini tack set I ever sent out into the world,
with some A+ phone photography.

After reading the blog for about a year, I figured it was high time to get myself some materials and start making tack. With some vinyl found at JoAnn's and a bottle of superglue, I pieced together a Classic scale English saddle, complete with paper clip stirrups. My heart is not broken over the fact that this monstrosity has somehow disappeared since...

Beyond her essential Tack Tips, I don't think there are many performance documentation sheets I've ever made without at least one of her gorgeous pictures. Her blog has been an invaluable resource to me as a performance shower because she makes it easy to bridge the gap between model horses and live ones.

The start of a time-sucking project earlier this week...

Her Tack and Performance Reference Indexes are bookmarked on my laptop- I know I can count on her clear, high-quality pictures to be a better tack reference than digging through Google Images.

On the blogging front, as soon as Jennifer added this blog to her sideroll, my traffic just about doubled, and I know a lot of people stay updated on what's going on here by monitoring my blog's icon on Braymere. I love being interconnected like this, and am still honored that I'm mentioned in the company of such wonderful other blogs!

Dreamflite Design

While Braymere inspired me to try tack, it was Anna Kirby's work that made me think that mini scales might be fun. Anna (Yager) and I fangirled over her blog and her website, at first in the "Who would ever want to make tack that small? That's insane!" kind of way, then slowly into the "I wonder if we could do that?" kind of way.

One of Leah Koerper's amazing entries at Sweet Onion Live earlier this year.

At the time, the only other mini tackmaker we were really aware of was Becky Yeager, who had some really amazing stuff out there too. Dreamflite was really the push in the right direction we needed. We took it as a very serious sign from the universe that if you combined these two artist's names, you could come up with Anna Yeager- which is one letter away from a perfect match. Clearly this was supposed to happen.

One of my favorite carriage horses working the downtown Seattle route.

By the time I'd decided to try making Stablemate tack, I'd read the entirety of her blog and spent hours just staring at the work she had posted on her website. Seeing the tack in this scale, and reading about how she did it, made it seem so easy. As yesterday's post attested, a lot of the methods I use to this day are inspired by her.

Shoestring Stable

I discovered Leah Koerper's blog shortly after my mini tack adventure began, and I quickly became very attached. While Anna Kirby's tack seemed almost unreal, Leah's tack and customs were presented in a way that felt a lot more relatable to me. Her entire Tips and Tricks tag is a thing of beauty.

The rider! The horse! Gimme!

Shoestring is another blog that really inspired me to get things done, because Leah just makes customizing look so easy! I still go back through her pastelling posts to get myself pumped when I have a horse to color. 

Leah is a fellow Region 1-er, and I briefly ran into her at Sweet Onion Live earlier this year. While I was a bit too scatter-brained, busy, and generally shy to really have a solid conversation with her, I did get a chance to sneak a few peeks at her absolutely amazing mini entries. I'm so jealous of her riders!

Five Paws Studio

I've never met or talked to Kristian, but hers is another blog that I've found myself becoming attached to. We have similar interests (inside and outside the hobby), so a new Five Paws post is always fun for me. Her current zombie horse is especially reminiscent for me of my past customizing adventures...

Kristian also took notice of this blog and linked to it on Five Paws before anyone else seemed too interested. The traffic she directed my way was huge for me- it felt like actual people were really reading my stuff!

Desktop Stables

There's something about making tiny versions of normal-sized things that's just so delightful, and I find a lot of that delight through Desktop Stables. Nichelle's blog is always visually amazing (I love how her header changes with the seasons!), and her miniatures are to die for. She recently made a bunch of Traditional scale western saddle pads that just absolutely knocked my socks off. 

Leah's jaw-dropping micro mini flat racing entry- how, Leah???

CK Tiny Tack

Christina Brown is quite possibly proof of magic. That, or she has a shrink ray that she's hogging all to herself, because I really struggle to picture any of her tack as starting out as just leather and materials. Her tack is a huge inspiration to me, and a standard that I hope I'll one day achieve!

My new reindeer slippers currently snuggling my feet.

And those are my Cool People! There are a few people I know I'm leaving off, but these are the people I feel most connected to or inspired by. 

I guess the last person I need to mention is collectively all of you, the people who read this here blog- all of your comments and even your views make me feel like I'm going in the right direction! Thank you so much to the commenters and silent readers alike. I know you're out there, and I appreciate you.

Back to real-time tack tomorrow, I promise! Another week of Blogidays to come- the question still stands, anything you'd really like to see? Tutorials? Performance thoughts? I promise we're done with memory lane. For now. :)

Blogidays Day Four: Epiphanies

Today's post is a trip down the memory lane of the various epiphanies I've had in my tackmaking adventures. These are those moments when I realize a much easier way to do something, or discover something that improves the final product noticeably.

Some of them probably sound pretty obvious, but I hope some new tackmaker out there finds this helpful!

1. Skiving

Good skiving and leather preparation is probably the biggest factor in separating good tack from great tack. I know, it's not very exciting and it can be really time-consuming, but its effect on the tack is absolutely worth it in the end. Mini tack is also great because you really don't use very much leather, so there isn't that much skiving to do compared to big tack. Power through!

Skiving is basically the process of making your leather thinner. Every tackmaker has their own style and way of going about it, and I'm sure you might have to make adjustments if you're making Traditional tack and need to work with thick tooling leather, but here's my process with skiver:

With a very, very sharp Xacto knife (right out of the package is great), slice almost horizontally along the rough side of the the skiver.

The chances of just slicing right through the leather are high, and that's okay. I like to just skive 1 in. square pieces of leather at a time, which is plenty of real estate to cut pattern pieces out of and allows for some messing up in the skiving.

The more fuzzies and shavings, the better!

Some people would then take a fine-grit sandpaper and gently sand the rough side to try and get it to a more even thickness, but in my personal experience, leather this thin is more likely to just tear when you sand it. I'm usually going for paper thin here (tissue paper thin for panel wrapping pieces).

When your piece is just about an even thickness throughout and can easily be folded over on itself and lay flat, break out your Gum Tragacanth (you don't have Gum Tragacanth? When you first get some, it'll be another tack epiphany. Your life will be different.) and smear a generous amount over where you just skived. Make sure your piece is smoothed flat on your work surface, and let the GT soak in. Especially at this thickness, the GT really helps hold the leather together and keep it smooth.

before...

...and after! (With a differently dyed piece)

And you have some nice thin leather! Proceed to wrap your knee rolls or panels, or cut out your skirts.

2. The Skirts are Just Glued Right On to the Tree

It took an embarrassingly long time for me to figure out how the skirts/pommel area of the saddle worked- is it one piece of leather covering the seat and the skirts? Are they separate? I didn't know!

Turns out, you can just cut skirt pieces out of your very thin leather and stick them right on where they need to go. That's it. I don't know why I struggled so much with this one.

3. Tweezers

I honestly don't know how I made mini tack before I tried using tweezers- now they're like an extension of my hand. I use my needle-nose tweezers for everything from holding bitty straps to bending bitty bridle buckles to dabbing glue right where it needs to go. I use them to poke slots open to make it easier to thread straps through, I use them to hold things together while they dry, I basically never put them down.

4. Cutting the Ends of Straps Into Little Points

This is the only way to get straps through those itty bitty buckles. Another one that I struggled with for an embarrassingly long time.

5. Cutting Lace from Skiver

Anna Kirby is who originally inspired me to make mini tack, and remains my tackmaking idol to this day. Her tutorial on using double-sided tape to cut lace from skived skiver has been completely life-changing for my tackmaking- I previously used 1/16" kangaroo lace, split more and more narrow for whatever I needed.

While some people can dye lace to match their skiver and don't have any problems with it, I could just never get strap goods made from lace to match the saddles in the same set. Rio Rondo's lace comes with an almost glossy finish on the grain side that rarely matched the finish on my skiver- all that plus the need to constantly split it by hand anyway drove me to look for another way. And now I constantly have a supply of pre-cut lace all ready to go, waiting in Dixie cups labeled with the dye color of those pieces, waiting to be snatched up for a bridle!

6. Cheating on Bridles

Another trick absolutely ripped off from Anna Kirby. This post of hers is pretty much exactly how I make my English bridles. The split browband trick in particular was eye-opening.

7. Using Soda Can in Panels

Panels are tricky. Really tricky.

For the longest time, I struggled with trying to come up with a method of making panels that made them nice and squishy, but also gave them the "panel shape" instead of just shapeless tubes. At some point in 2011 it struck me- soda can! Now my method includes cutting out the above pattern from soda can, and lining the bottom side (the side not attached to the saddle) with felt or chamois before wrapping the whole thing in super thin leather. The soda can also lets you shape the panel into the exact shape to sit nicely along the bottom of the saddle, and even help the flaps keep their shape. Win-win!

For those of you who make tack, what were your tackmaking epiphanies?