From Myself Two Years Ago

    July 17, 2020

Hello future me! Today is July 17, 2020. I am 13 years old, and I am a rising 7th grader. I hope that you are still collecting model horses, and making tack. Have you been to model horse shows, and/ or Breyerfest? ( I hope so! ) Right now my blog has 374 views, are you a successful tack maker? Are you still blogging? Right now I have about 20 model horses, not including the stablemates. Right now it is the coronavirus pandemic. I have been SO bored! Next year I will only be going to school two days of the week.

    Right now I ride at Mulford horse farm, do you still ride there? I have sewn one rider a jacket, and I have rerooted her hair and customized her arms. It didn't come out very well... but I hope that you customize a lot more dolls and model horses. Do you have any artist resins or peter stones? I have always wanted an artist resin, they are so pretty!

    Right now I read Braymere Custom Saddlery and Field Of Dolls Studio. I love to read about these two awesome tack makers. I want to be just like them when I grow up. Have you won any nan cards? I can't wait to go to a model horse live show. Are they as fun as they sound? 

    So that is all that I have to say. Good luck at high school! I will now set the publish date to two years from now.

Bye!

13 year old Jamie Choe

I’m Hot

      Hello! Today I’m feeling hot. So basically what happened was our air conditioning broke yesterday. The electrician can’t fix it until next week so we’re stuck being hot. The weather outside is souring to the 90s and inside the house it feels like it’s 100 degrees. So I haven’t spent much time upstairs working, but I did make another saddle.

I made two of these and I’m going to keep one. The other is going up for sale on my Etsy page.

I love this saddle! I wanted to keep both, but what am I supposed to do with two identical saddles!

Look at the tunnel that the gerbils dug!

Stablemate Tack

I was digging around in my boxes full of model horse stuff, and I found a stablemate! So I decided to attempt a stablemate scale tack set for a girl at a barn that I volunteer at. 

Let me just say, it was ALOT harder than it looks. I don’t know how other tack makers, such as Anna Helt, manage to make stablemate tack so realistic!

     I didn’t have leather lace that was thin enough so I had to cut my own. Then I had to skive everything paper thin. I cut through so many pieces of leather!

My uncle heard that I had no mini whinnies, so he sent me some. Thank you soooo much uncle Hugh!

 

Sewn!

 Today I tried something new, I sewed and glued my saddle and girth! I wanted to make my tack more durable.

At first I was worried that my sewing machine would have a hard time going through the leather, but since the leather was fairly thin, the needle went through great!

   This was a great way to improve my saddles, I won't ever worry about my saddles falling apart. I can't believe that I didn't try this sooner! 

Say hello to foster bunny, Penelope! 

A Super Long Girth

Recently I sold two hunter sets. A few days ago the lady told me that the girths for the saddles were too short. I thought that this was weird, because the girths had fit on all of my models. Anyway, today I made two extra long girths. 

Here is the girth compared to a dressage girth.  

She also requested that instead of buckles, if I could use hooks. I had never heard of a girth with hooks, but I managed to invent a hook attachment!

How the hooks work is that you use these small attachments to buckle it to the saddle. Then you can use the D rings to hook on the girth!

Here's a little tip: if you need a really small bag to ship of tack items, you can use the tiny bags that the stirrups come in!

(Just peel of the Rio Rondo sticker first)

 

Lacing, Lacing, Everywhere!

Yesterday I neared the end for my newest tack set. All that I had to do was start lacing the reins. So I packed up a needle, the reins, and some thread in a small container.

For the next few hours I would sit down, do a few stitches and then go do something else. There was lacing on the couch... during lunch... and everywhere else you can imagine. 

There might have been some lacing during science class.... Oh the joys of online learning!

Well in the end my hard work paid off and I finished this beautiful set.

Saddle Number 2

Yesterday a lady messaged me on Etsy and asked if I could make her two saddle sets for Christmas. I worked out the details with her and I got crafting. The secret to creating a good saddle tree is to use a soda can. A soda can is thin metal and you can easily bend it into the shape of a saddle tree. I'll probably do a tutorial on making saddles... someday.... 

Since I got new leather it was so much easier to cut out the shapes that I needed. The hardest part about cutting out leather pieces is getting the edges straight. 

Here is the finished saddle! All I need to do now is attach stirrups and make a girth. I'll leave that for tomorrow. Right now I'm too tired.

Benji, lounging in the sun.

Cindy, trying on her new Santa hat I made for her.

 

Scrap Boots

        Almost every tack maker has some sort of scrap box. Mine is this box of random leather scraps that I hopefully will use someday. I mostly keep it because leather is EXPENSIVE and I don't want to waste any piece of it. Today I noticed that my scrap box was getting quite full so I wanted to make something out it.

Today I made some " scrap boots". I dug out my boots pattern from my pattern bag and I got to work.

First I cut out the shape and then added stitch marks along the edge. Using the pounce wheel on super thin leather is hard! the leather kept on twisting and moving so my stitches came out a bit crooked. I tried again, and it was a bit better. 

Now I made the cup shapes and added leather lace ( also from my scrap box).

The only thing that was not a scrap was the buckles.

 Here it is on Protocol:

* Sigh * Don't you just hate it when you now have to make a second boot look exactly the same? Well that took me another hour fiddling, to make it the same size, and look.

Now the scrap boots are proudly strapped onto Protocol. Get it? The Strapless mold? 

Ha Ha Ha!

 

Donut Bareback pad

 Today I wanted to try and sew something new so I made a bareback pad! This was my first one and it took MANY tries. Well at least I had something to do for an hour! First I made a basic pattern and traced it on a piece of black fabric. 

Next I cut out a piece of thin batting. This batting is really thin so I use it in my saddle pads.

Then I sewed around the shape and cut it out.

After I sewed it around I then flipped it inside out. This was the hardest part for me because I kept on ripping it or I made the pattern too small.

Too small!😂

This is how the bareback pad looks now. I added the donut fabric and a ribbon to use as the girth.

Here it is on a horse:

I think that I will continue sewing different pads until I get the perfect one. Well at least now I can check bareback pad off the list! ✓

Bridle Update

    Today I made to bridles with the lace that I dyed. This was my first time attempting to create a figure eight bridle. It came out really nice! It was a challenge with all of the tiny buckles but I eventually got it on the model horse. 

This is a simple snaffle bridle that I made. 

On the snaffle bridle I added a raised browband. It took many tries but I eventually got it to look fairly good.

A while ago on Rio Rondo I saw that they sold D- rings. I of course needed some, so I added it to my list. I should have read the sizes more carefully because they were WAY bigger than I expected. Well I had an awesome idea, I can use them as bits! So now I'm glad that I have giant ( but not so giant) D- rings.

Now I just have to add some reins to my bridles. 😋