Well.. that wasn't THAT hard..

HA!

I'm coming down the home stretch so to speak for finishing my Mother Hubbard Saddle Set! Just the Cinch, the stirrups and the tapaderos to go! My good friend, Robin P is making the stirrups out of real wood for me. I'm pretty excited about it!

The pictures shown are of the bridle and bosilla finished. The bridle has a hand made, hand etched bit that I made myself out of real silver. The buckes on the bridle are made out of real silver as well. Then I hand braided the reins and put turks head and spanish ring knots on the reins.

The bosilla is also hand braided and has a six part, seven bight knot on the heel of it. The mecate (The long rope) was also hand braided and has a turks head knot on each head of the tassel on each end.

I think that this saddle set really shows the range of my capabilities and I'm very proud of it!

I friggin did it!

To the left, you will see a miniature buckle made out of solid silver, that I have FINALLY figured out how to make! I'm so excited! Now to make more tonight!

This week has stunk..

Lets just throw that out there now. This week has been really stressful! Thank gawd it's the weekend now!

I've been having a horrible time working out how to make buckles for my bridle. I don't know if its the stress of life or if I've just reached the edge of my creativity, but I've had a really hard time.

I also think that the bits I made might be a smidge out of scale. (too large). At least the bits can be fixed in the future but Oh goodness have I despised making buckles!

I haven't heard anything from the museum I was making the saddle set for and thats a bit stressful and disappointing as well.

I totally took last night off of working on tack. I don't do that often but I thought that by taking some time off, I could distance myself from the stress and disappointment. TIme off that might refuel my drive.... I also went shopping today with my husband and we found some fantastic bargains (which makes us both happy) HE really is great company and was wonderful for making me laugh..

So no new pictures today but I hope to have some this coming week! WISH ME LUCK!

it goes.. A, B THEN C...

I have spent this weekend working on making a connector bar for the bit shanks that I made. I should have known that poking holes on those little tiny teardrop pieces at the end of the bit shanks would be disastrous - in fact the night before I actually thought about it and warned myself that they would break. They did. So After successfully completing a simple connector bar, I then had to go back and completely redo the bit shanks. This proved to be a good thing because now they are more true to real spade bits. The Hole in the middle is smaller and more in keeping with the design. Ya live and you learn.. and as I've heard on a TV show "Every problem is an opportunity in disguise".