Carrizozo's Hackamore: Developments

 

This Hackamore is taking some twists and turns.  Thus I have an opportunity to practice short blog posts.  :)  What I should have remembered, and taken into account, was that a fiador made for a Trad scale horse (to wit, Adios), no matter how short, would be too large in gauge for a Small Trad.  This became obvious to me only in mid-stride, when, overcome with pride and curiosity during the braiding of the browband button, I went ahead and rigged the whole thing.  'Rigged' here means tying the fiador and mecate to the bosal and headstall/hangar.  Smack hand to forehead!!  Something wasn't right...

In addition to a fiador out of scale, alas for my vision of a braided rawhide throatlatch!  Why did I not recall that a fiador by definition meant needing a browband as well as a hangar, but no throatlatch?  I don't know.  My memory is rusty sometimes.

 Of course this shows the browband button unfinished, with the long and short thread ends sticking up and out any old way...  :)

I made the hangar (headstall) as my Muse had indicated, with the orange ring in the center of the off cheek and a twisted-wire buckle on the near.  Next, envisioning a second ring in the center of the browband, I made the brow halves.  There was a struggle over the brow conchos;  I had nothing in stock -- all my cast ones were much too large.  Creating conchos from scratch, while possible, would have meant a whole lot of metalwork, something I wasn't ready to do in the middle of a short braidwork piece.  Daintiness being needed, I squeezed out a couple of rings of twisted wire, which had the benefit of matching the buckle.  (A tiny voice warned the white fiador would not fit through the browband openings.)  Doing the browband button unfortunately led to a rabbit-hole:  I had somehow lost a page of braid formulas I had written out, which I thought I needed.  Nasty discovery!!  Frantic emails to a braiding friend!!  Hours of pawing through everything in 2 rooms!!  No joy...

The rabbit-hole was eventually evaded by realizing a 9P4B button formula was common and easily regenerated by all my books.  That was the orange part (below).  (Why was I so fussed!?  but thank you anyway, Heather!)  I put white interweave rings in, not by the numbers so much as by a shortcut I'd evolved myself after years of using formulae... and to my happy surprise, 5 rings resulted.  I didn't think there was space for 5 black rings.  So I tried putting in 3.  I was quite pleased by the look of this.

But now I had to solve the fiador problem.  The tiny voice had indeed been right.  Not in scale!! --- the worst curse of the model tackmaker.   Ten years ago I had created a special fiador for a customer using thread spun in a 2-color twist, something I'd evolved for mecates.  The memory of that came back to me:

On the road as I was [Nov. 1-4], with only black and white heavy thread to hand, I conveniently forgot that Salinero's fiador had been made with very thin thread (HQ, or hand quilting).  Thus it came about that Carrizozo's Hackamore currently includes both a mecate that was too small for Trads, and a fiador made from thread that was too big.

All I can say is it looks good at the moment.

There is a blog post in October 2016 about a hackamore similar to this one (pictured below):  A Pony Hackamore.  Possibly my standards of decorum have slipped a little;  Carrizozo's has much louder braidwork than the earlier one.  But the idea is the same, using leftovers to fit a smaller horse.  

It is so much fun to be making tack again.