A few months ago, a friend asked me if I'd like to go to The Little Horse Show - put on by Stone Horses, in Indiana, in early September. I said, "sure!".
After paying for entry, I began studying the class list and then an idea crept in. What if I did Performance? What if I did only Performance? What if... I picked ONE horse and tried to enter every single class with that horse?
I was quite intrigued by the idea and thought it would be a great "excuse" to push my tack making and my (largely untested) Performance showing skills.
Then came the selection process.
First I thought, which breed can do everything? Which could I probably find lots of references for? Arabian was what I came up with - it doesn't hurt that they are a favorite breed of mine.
Okay, which Arabian? I briefly considered the idea of making a CM Stablemate Arabian in a walking or trotting pose, but I decided trying to do that AND make ALL of the tack and entries might be a bit much, even for me...
My pick, as you may already know by now, was a mini Khemosabi resin that I had painted during NaMoPaiMo in 2020. I had named him Sound The Bugle. I really liked the idea of doing this adventure with him.
A certain little bay Arabian was drafted from that chaos there and chosen to prep for another big show.
As a bit of a bonus, for the marathon of tack making to come, he has his own "stunt double". I have another copy of this resin, still unpainted.
Okay, little guy(s), let's get to work!
I did a TON of brain storming, research, and note taking.
First up for studio work was sculpting some saddle trees. As much as I had planned to use the stunt double for most things, I had to draft the "hero horse" for making saddle trees, because I figured I would need several saddles.
I used Apoxy Sculpt and started with a variety of saddles in mind (english, western, endurance, costume). In the days to come, as the saddle trees were cured, I popped them off the horses and sculpted more.
(Those little plastic bins I had found at the dollar store proved to be absolutely necessary for this whole project)
More saddle stuff!
The bin for saddles started having a good number to experiment with.
In addition to saddles, I would need a lot of leather lace. I skivved, prepped, and split lace in a few colors.
For sizes, I had prepped everything from 1/4", 1/8", 3/32", and 1/16"... but even 1/16" was too wide. I knew I would have split it. Oddly, that was something I put off for a little while. I hadn't done it before and I was overthinking it (big surprise).
An interesting development - once I had a pile of prepped lace and was avoiding splitting some of it - was that I ended up dog sitting for a friend of ours for a few days. Last time I had done this, I had taken some projects over and hung out. Most notably, I started an Arabian costume that I think of as "The Lucy".
This is Lucy. She is a very sweet pupper.
I've long known of the power of being "somewhere else" for the creative process, particularly when stuck on a project.
It was while hanging out with Lucy again that I started splitting leather lace and.. I found it easy to do!
The prep work, fabrication, and assembly continued at tack desk in the studio,
and at the kitchen bar that Brent built.
You can see how much those little bins helped. Also, a lot of post it notes were used to try and stay organized - while trying to work on a project that was actually several smaller ones at the same time.
This was, more or less, the start of the whole thing!
