Posts Tagged ‘draft tack’

NMTM – Finished!

Posted in NMTM, Tack, tagged , , , on April 26, 2017| 16 Comments »

Finished… with a few days to spare! 🙂 I got the flights and ribbons completed today, so all was left was to dress the horse up and get pictures taken.

I am really happy with how the entire set came together.

There are things that bug me and of course there is always room for improvement, but I think it’s ok?

I hope so!

I’ve found it really hard to find any information on sets like these (as well as showing a Suffolk Punch in general) on the internet, so I’m hoping that I got it right… or close to right, anyway. 😉

I am so happy it’s finished, and kind of relieved too. I’ve wanted to make this horse tack since I got him – I’m glad NMTM gave me the extra push to get it done! ^_^

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NMTM – Progress Report #4

Posted in NMTM, Tack, tagged , , on April 23, 2017| 10 Comments »

I’ve had a lot of setbacks since I last posted about my NMTM project. Lately I’ve been dealing with a lot of foot-related pain ranging from annoying to severe, so that’s been a major distraction, especially since I’m on my feet all day at work. :/

However I did manage to get some straps skived and attached, mainly the lead and side reins:

And yes, there are two different colors of lace there, because, suprise! I’m out of the darker stuff and didn’t want to wait for another batch to arrive in the mail. Grrr! So now my set’s got a mix of brown shades and it’s annoying but eh, moving onward!

Another setback was that my original plan for making the surcingle wasn’t going to work at all. I wanted to make it out of leather lace, but the stuff I have just wasn’t wide enough. I decided to go with tooling leather but another surprise! Mine wasn’t long enough, as I’m making a surcingle from one long strap.

Sooo a leather order was placed, which turned out to be a really good thing in the end:

Yeahhh I think this is long enough

More straps were cut and skived. It’s tough to show progress at this point since everything’s being loosely held in place, waiting for final adjustments and the surcingle to be completed:

I’m really glad I went with the tooling leather for the surcingle. This piece is about 12 inches long… I did have to trim it down later but I always think it’s better to have too much than not enough! My photos make it look black, but it’s really a nice chocolate brown that (almost) matches my lace.

The padding underneath was an experiment that I made up as I went along. Looking back, I think I would do some things differently but that’s the good thing about trying something new, right?

Anyway, it was made by gluing together layers of felt, cut slightly smaller than the width of the strap.

They were covered by stretching a thin piece of skiver over the top, and using a small ball/dotting tool to get in all the tight spots. I trimmed off the excess afterward, and while the result isn’t terribly neat, I like how it looks.

Here’s the finished surcingle, crupper, and back strap. (or whatever that piece is really called…) I may redo the crupper later as this one really bothers me. I was  glad to find that Woodbridge can have an actual crupper instead of a faux one though – hooray for no sticky wax!

Here it is on the horse – I think it’s done! I do have to make the flights and ribbons, and get more detailed photos too, but yeah!

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NMTM – Progress Report #3

Posted in NMTM, Tack, tagged , , , on April 12, 2017| 10 Comments »

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!

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