Back On The Saddle

This morning I went straight down to the Studio and got back to work on my first leather saddle.

I had started on it a few weeks ago and then was derailed by the stock show madness.  Today I put a few hours or so worth of time on it, but then I started to get frustrated.  So I decided to take a break... which ended up being for the rest of the day.  It's often hard for me to do something for the first time, especially if (when) things don't go right.  I'm a perfectionist and I try really hard to follow directions to the letter and do things right the first time.  However, of course, the first time often doesn't turn out quite right.  Still... it gets to me.  I did get quite a bit of work done on the first few steps of assembly and I am looking forward to working on it again tomorrow - that's a good sign.

I also did some work on my latest cross-stitch saddle pad, one I'd started during the stock show.  It is a diamond pattern, like this pink one:

But the color I chose for the diamonds this time is a pretty emerald green.

The last model horse related task I did this afternoon was put in a bit of time starting to catch up on my collection of reference cutouts.  I picked up a ton of cool magazines, catalogs, and so on at the stock show, and today I started sorting some of the cool pictures I found in them.  Still a lot more work to do there.  It's been a while since I've done a big round of making layout pages with my vast cutout collection.

I'm figuring that tomorrow will be more of the same...  saddle, cross-stitch, reference organizing..  maybe some customizing.  I'm looking at a couple of live shows in a few of weeks and I REALLY want to get some new work finished by then.