Starting some Romal Reins

A Work-in-Progress shot is turning into a blog post before my eyes.  Around the five-sentence mark in a FaceBook post is where the transition occurs.  How is it I have so much to say about a simple set of Romal Reins?  This pair is for a customer I am trying to reward for having bid on an earlier offering of the TSII's.  I know perfectly well emotion is a poor method of business management, yet I fall sway to it so often. 

I'm particularly pleased with the turnback button.  The connector button, on the other hand, is very nearly too big!  But it'll do.

Turnback is where the rein turns back on itself to form the end loop; a turnback button is pear-shaped, swelling larger on one end.  The swell is difficult to do in miniature braidwork, but can be achieved with careful core ties and a lot of fingertip squeezing.  Something else new with this set is the duplication thread, enlarging the white foundation.  (It looks white but is actually palest pink off-white, a color I want to call "pinkoff".)  I ran a parallel with my smallest thread, HQ (Hand Quilting), custom dyed rawhide-color just for this set.  (It was originally dyed for the connector buttons, at which it failed.)  I wanted to enhance the foundation without going so far as to double it; I wanted a subtle emphasis on the white to tone down the strength of the brown and rust, which appear very powerfully. 

As to the size of the connector, well, I was trying a new button and a new thread size, and somehow increased concentration often leads to outsize results.  So often I see this in models!!   So often I do it myself.  It's just hard to shrink things, to get the right proportions.  Compression generates heat.  This is a long philosophical discussion which I should not go into; we'll just say it takes time and skill to make a truly good-looking miniature.

As to why there's no slider on that connector, I'm trusting the huge size of the button, plus the small diameter of the future bit ring, to perform that function.  Just another sleight-of-eye trick from the tackmaker who's made dozens of these connectors.  There isn't any space to spare and I refuse extra work.


In other news:  future blog subjects might be Kathleen Bond and a night at Penn National.