A couple more saddle photos

Saddle is done, and I'm starting on the tiedown here. I added a fleece pad to go under the suede blanket to help the saddle fit narrower models like the Stone ISH.

More Western saddle pics

I hope my American readers had a great Thanksgiving! Dad and Grandma visited and we had a wonderful time.

Here are some more photos of my in-progress Western set, it's come along a ways since last time.



Still need to add the girth connector strap and the rear saddle strings.

Fender swung back to show the left cinch strap. The saddle strings are on the short side, but as far as I can tell there's no set length, on real saddles I see short strings, medium strings, and strings that go on for miles. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, though. (I just hate the idea of re-threading those things...!)

I went with a straight cantle instead of a Cheyenne roll. I just like the look better!


There's a wire that runs under Amazon's belly that's holding the fenders down. Still haven't trained the things.


And as you can see, I've woven a breastcollar and cinch for this set. The colors don't match perfectly, but at least they're in the same tonal range. The woven chest strap was my own addition, patterned after real b/cs, I liked the look better than simply stringing a piece of lace onto the center ring. I still need to work on getting the lower end to taper to a thinner point. BIG thank you to Rio Rondo for their nifty little booklet!

Until next time!

Quick pre-Turkey Day post

I finally got the courage and the supplies to try my hand at a woven string cinch (had Rio Rondo's book for years LOL). This is the first one, I also made a cinch and breastcollar to match my Western set. Weaving on diamond patterns is still eluding me and soldering the jump rings is a pain (the only solder I had was the "heavy duty" stuff RR doesn't recommend!), but I think I'm getting the hang of it. I'll have photos of the second set as soon as the camera battery charges.

I hope everyone who celebrates it has a great Thanksgiving, and everyone else has a great weekend. :) I spent a good chunk of the day baking oatmeal cranberry cookies, now I'm sitting here smelling all kinds of delicious food cooking upstairs, and I will be able to eat none of it until tomorrow afternoon. The torture!

Silent Saturday!

No, not really.

Here's some in-progress photos of the Western saddle I've been working on. Those fenders kind of make it look like poor Katie's got a really, really impatient rider. ("training" fenders and skirts to lie flat is one of my least favorite parts of tackmaking)


After some trouble getting the fork assembly to stay glued on (finally fixed with Loc-Tite, I think it was the cold making the original glue brittle?), I devised a different method for securing the seat to the skirt. Susan Bensema-Young's method of using wire to secure her saddle pieces was the inspiration, but since I'm working with a resin tree, I borrowed my sister's Dremel.

I drilled four holes in the seat, with recessed grooves connecting each side, then four more behind the cantle. Then after some careful positioning, I poked the tailor's awl through the seat holes to mark the leather, then punched holes through. Then it was a matter of threading 32 gauge wire through the holes and pulling tight, and then twisting and and flattening the wire ends. (they're covered by the chamois and a bit of undyed skiver). The cantle was tied down using waxed thread. And here's the result:

The recessed grooves are so the wire doesn't stick up under the seat covering. I will probably have to file the wire down anyway (flattening it with the hammer made it less pliable).


(earlier photo) Another reason I went with wiring: the fenders are strung onto hammered aluminum rings sewn on to the skirts. I do this because you can rotate the fenders back to fiddle with the girth (not as far as this once the seat and jockeys are attached :p). I also had to hollow out the tree with a sanding drum to accommodate the extra bulk. I don't think glue would have worked with all this, or at least not well.

The girth on the left side is tied at the moment with a latigo knot, though once I've got the holder in place I'll thread it through that. I hope I can muster the courage to try making a woven string cinch and breastcollar for this set, but for now I just made a nice leather girth.

I also made some skiver "gloves" for the fender buckles to keep the tongues from scratching the model. I really want to try the mini Blevins buckles that TWMHC/ALE Ranch is selling. Really cool that someone has made them for the hobby!

And I'll leave you with another new herd member:

Red roan suits this mold nicely!

Halter and some other critters

First off, a black and silver stock breed halter made for the Stone ISH, for sale for $30 ppd.

The strap tips are 18 gauge aluminum wire hammered flat and filed to shape. The cheek silver is embossing aluminum with tooling and purple 5ss size Swarovski crystals.


Since that's all the tack I have to show off at the moment, how about some non-equine figurines from my collection:

"Ingrid"

I don't actually own this one anymore, I sold her to a collector in Spain several weeks ago. But she was so darn cute I had to include her. I showed her as a Pietran sow. She was a MIC resin found at a flea market in New Braunfels, Texas.

"Miakoda"

A Hagen-Renaker mini buffalo. I got him one day walking back to work from from lunch. Work was located just a block or two away from the San Antonio Riverwalk in Texas, and you could take a shortcut through several little shops located below street level, overlooking the riverwalk. That was one of the nicest places I ever worked.

"Spirit"

A H-R Papa Wolf, and my stable mascot. :) He was sadly attacked by an enraged Breyer unicorn one day and broke three legs. He's been repaired, but there was a chip lost out of his right front leg. I've never been able to find one of these with this kind of detailing.

"Sarabi"

A chalky Breyer Elephant. She came sealed in her box with a catalog from 1976! Since 2002 I've seen several of these on eBay, as well as at many antique malls around Kansas City, MO (just saw one last month, in fact!). Someone here in KC had attended a warehouse sale downtown and bought several cartons of elephants, all sealed in their boxes. According to the vendor, they were sold at the 1976 Republican National Convention, held at Kemper Arena, so I guess these were the leftovers. Now I wonder if there are any chalky Breyer Donkeys from the '76 DNC floating around NYC... hmmm.

Top row left to right: Tabitha, Little Orphan Annie, Rishi, and Scar;
Bottom row: Fraidy, Cissie, Marmalade, Smudge, and Uncle Bob.
(yeah, I named a few after dear old kitty friends who have shared our home.
It's how I remember them.)

Because no barn, real or model, is complete without barn cats, right? :D Most are either Schleich or H-Rs, the three matching tabby and white kitties are hand-painted pewter and came from Germany. The kitten... oh, wait, you can't see her? She's on the tack trunk, next to the left front paw of Rishi the tiger cub. :p OK, here's a closeup:


As I was saying, "Annie" is only slightly bigger than a penny:

I showed her once in a live show that was offering an "other animals" division, and she won Reserve Champion Other Animal. She really was dwarfed by that rosette she won...

And here's one that actually belongs to my mother, but I had to include him:

This is a George Good "I 'heart' My Cat" series porcelain, found at an antique mall in the same shopping center as our local Tandy store. He's not in scale to Breyers, but how could we not bring him home? It's a Si figurine!

Until next time!

Sunday edition

First off, I discovered that the halter that I made for the Stone Weanling, also fits Breyer's Stormy. And I think it actually looks better on her. It is for sale on eBay.

Oh, and jsyk I can use ^ this backdrop ^, with some foreground adjusting, for everything from Trad size foals like Sandpiper up there, to Stablemates and Micro Minis like Aunt Pat and Cassidy here:


Too small for Trad adults, though.

I'm also attempting my third Rio Rondo Western saddle kit. How I love these things! After making the first two pretty much by the book, I decided to try out their alternate patterns. And I'm also dying them to a mahogany color, and the seat and stirrup treads will be sand colored suede. Still not quite ready to tackle tooling, though, so I just stuck with stitchmarking.

The skirt pattern I've chosen uses cinch rings instead of slots. In a DIY mood, I rummaged around in a box of supplies that I'd accumulated over the years, but hadn't used much, and turned up a spool of 18 gauge (or "guage" as its spelled on the packaging :D) aluminum wire.

Next I needed to hammer it flat. A jeweler's hammer and anvil would come in handy for this, but I don't own either of those. So two hammers from the toolkit would have to do, one to hammer, and one to take the place of the anvil:


Put some papers under the red hammer to pad the table (which is already a battered old thing, don't try this on a nice table!) and gently tapped away. It takes some doing to get even flattening, and I'm still getting the hang of it. But here you go:

Now I actually form the rings first, then hammer them. And I form them at the end of a fairly long piece of wire (longer than the examples here!) so I can safely hold them while hammering. I need flat wire, not flat fingers.

Here's the d-rings attached to the main skirt.



I've since redone the cinch straps so they're removable. This will be a ranch or trail saddle, nothing flashy but will have saddle strings and an extra D-ring on the pommel for a rifle scabbard. This was inspired by some of the real saddles at the Texas Ranger museum, which I blogged about in March.

That's all for now!

Fall is fell

I ordered a yard of of the pink 'roo lace from Australia, then as I was taking an inventory for another order, I came across a couple feet of lace from a previous order. Oh, well, can't have too much of something that takes a month to ship, right? So I made a halter for the Stone Weanling. It's for sale $25 ppd First Class, Paypal or MOs. If it doesn't sell by Sunday, it's going up on evilBay.

In kitty news, Si has a new "jacket" harness from Met Pet. We've tried other harness options and he's wiggled his way out of all of them. This one seems determined to stay put, and Si is slowly but surely (with lots of complaining!) coming around to having it on. He gets to go outside as a treat when he accepts it, and he's getting the idea.

Here he is on his way downstairs...


Gives the car a butt slam and a tail rub on the way out...



And a nice roll on the warm pavement, surrounded by his favorite "salad", dried leaves. And it being fall and all, there's an abundance of them in the driveway. Heaven for a leaf-muncher like Si! (no, we don't let him eat them, but he sure loves to try....)


That's old Allie's leash that she used for many years. The weight really irritates him, though, so we're looking to get one that's a lighter weight.

I've got several model "barn cats" on the shelves, I wonder if I could do one of these in miniature. Hmm...