NMTM – Progress Report #3

I was hoping to have more posts (and progress!) made by now, but last week was rough and… yeah. BUT, some progress was made over the weekend!

I got the crown piece and browband made.

The crown piece is split, which is always a bit stressful (for me anyway!) as it can go wrong so easily. Mine isn’t exactly how I want it either… since I used two different buckle sizes on the cheek and throat pieces, I tried to cut the lace in the correct widths to match that. I came close, and everything buckles ok, but the hardware is really rough on the lace because it’s not exact. I doubt I could get it exactly right, but it’s something I need to pay closer attention to in the future.

The browband came out ok though.

Most of my references have this decorative stitching on each end, so I added that and went over it with the gold paint again. I kind of like how it’s tying together with the hardware and all.

The next piece I decided to tackle was the brass rosettes on the browband. On my refs, this is almost always a circle with a scalloped edge, and a cone-like shape in the center of it. (though I did find one made from pieces of leather!)
I really didn’t want to stick with a plain brass circle as a substitute, so I tried to make them from scratch instead.

At first I thought a 1/4 in circle would be large enough. I used a circle template to visualize this:

I used the template to cut a bunch of circles out from paper. In the end, I went with a 5/16 circle as it looked the best on the browband:

To make the rosettes, I rolled out a thin sheet of black polymer clay and used the template to cut out a tiny circle.

The “cone” shape was made by stacking even smaller circles on top of each other. It was very fiddly to get right, and I did have to squish up a few attempts before I got one I was happy with:

Instead of trying to make another one exactly like it, I decided to make a mold from Amazing Mold Putty. I picked up this stuff a while ago from Michaels and have played around with it for polymer clay food.

The copy isn’t quite like the original, but it’s fairly close. These I painted with gold alcohol ink:

They’re attached to the browband with E6000:

On the horse:

They’re not super shiny and perfect but I think they turned out ok. 🙂 I am pretty happy with how this set is coming together. I still have plenty of pieces to make though. April’s nearly halfway over already, ack!