Siltsox in Ironton

This post will be about that happy but mysterious confluence of vacation, model horses and photography.  It all took place high in the Colorado Rockies during May of this year.  I love to wander in the cool aspen and pine forests of the high country.  The Castaway Cob has a spiritual brother in my Black Hand, Siltsox.
Who is this horse, and why his funky name?

This shot was taken in the living room of my parent's house in Boulder, using my brother's wonderful light tent.  (My parents're not my caregiving subject.)(Not yet.)  My brother is something of a professional photographer (go to Flickr and search for AllenBPhotography), and he was showing off his fancy gear and stuff.  He wanted to practice on a model horse, which, of course, I had in plentiful supply, even while travelling.  I had purchased my Black Hand sometime between August of 2012 and March of 2013 (for once, a horse gets by my card system!).  Since he was even more 'tubular' than the Pony of the Americas, which I conga, I thought about naming him Siltsox.  Silt socks are those plastic mesh tubes stuffed with straw that construction companies use to block water flow down a slope.  You see them lying around like fat snakes in various colors, black, green, orange.  I just loved the word.

When Sergeant Reckless came out, I immediately thought these two should go together, making a married pair.  It was my husband who suggested the most perfect name for her:  Versalox.  After all she is built like a brick!!  Versalox are precast, self-locking brick elements used in retaining walls...
So that is why the horse with the socks is not named Siltsox... just so's y'know...

So here we are, pulled off on the road down to Ironton, Colorado.  We had been here once before, birdwatching, so we knew it existed.  Ironton is a ghost town.  It was built during Colorado's gold rush days, 1848 to 1868.  We are just off Highway 550, Colorado's million-dollar-highway, about 6 miles straight east of Telluride.

This is the first building you see, and the best.  The poster tells about the efforts of volunteers to rescue and stabilize these ancient structures.  Really that's all they've got going for them.  That's a pile of snow in the lee of the building...  It is mid-May in the high country.

This is what you see turning to the left:  a couple of decrepit barns or sheds, structures for sheltering animals.

And the irresistability begins.  What more appropriate than a barn?  Siltsox has spent all this time mewed up in a pony pocket stuffed in a Stone horse box, riding in the back seat.  He's been there for at least 2 weeks, and he only got out a little during the Utah part.

If I back up I can get some context for the setting.

This barn, or shed, was better preserved than some.  You could clearly tell it had livestock in it at one point.

The cross beams are holding up the roof.  I love the textures of old wood.

Can you spot him?

Here I've walked uphill and back around the first building.  It is a house.  We found out that its owner lived there all her life, even after the town was abandoned.  She passed away in 1965... when I was a child.  This shot features my patient husband, sitting down, slightly right of center. 

It would be a pity if this were lost to the elements.  The roof has been replaced.  Not too bad, when you consider how old it really is...

Siltsox doing what he does best:  posing.

This is my favorite pic of the litter.  The colors of the old woods are fascinating.

This is exactly the same pose, but I've moved the center focus up off the horse and tried to capture what's inside.  I don't know about you, but I'm always curious about what's really inside of an abandoned house.  What went on?

This is looking over his shoulder, as it were.  I suspect some of the boards are replacements:  could such color have survived 200 years of Colorado weather?

True to my previous behaviour (see the blog post on Rikki's Prizes) the horse is getting smaller and smaller, and the surroundings are getting larger and larger.  I'm getting carried away with these ancient old houses.  This one is deeper in the forest from the first white one and to its right.  It is larger and has more outbuildings.

The stairs were built by hand:  you can tell from the irregular corner turn.  The weather is so cold that even stairways get thick walls.

Here is that house from the right side.  The whiter house is behind and beyond in this view.

The structure extends through a series of sheds.  They all have interior runways, so you can get out to the livestock even if buried by snow.

See that miserable little shed on the far right?  That's the outhouse.

This is looking uphill at the right-hand end of the house.  The outhouse is thus located behind where my initials are.
If you ever get a chance to visit Ironton, I hope you can see these reminders of a time gone by.
And don't forget to let the horses stretch their legs!

Goehring's Fenders Etc

This will be a brief and -- yippee skip!! already outdated!! --  update on the progress of this marvelous Mexican saddle order.  Pictures are always behind actual construction, for which I can only blame my photographer (me).  I needed some fresh outlook, so I tried the bridle and breastcollar on a different horse.  The result you may view above.  Oh, he looks good...

When last we saw this saddle, the stirrups were here:

Since then, I've finished them.  The bolt ends of the necks are covered in the tiny Aluminum star conchos, all of which were made by hand.  It's amazing that an X-Acto knife can cut metal, but it does.  The necks were painted in my Fiebing's Saddle Tan Oil Dye, the only bottle of such stuff on hand.  Boy it stinks but nothing else gives that color.  I tried it on the tree too:

I am pleasantly surprised at the results.
I still have a few questions about the tree, and the seat in particular (right now).  All my references but one did not show the seat front, er, the exact place where the rider's buttocks would rest.  It was hidden in shadow.  I supposed it would be covered in the same basketweave as the rest:

But a closer look reveals that it is plain.  There was one shot that showed clearly it was not stamped.

Surprise, surprise.  I think I can handle this.
While we're on the subject of Mexican style Charro saddles, I'd like to include a link to an amazing collection of reference pictures, posted by Luis Aguilar of Mexico City.
Nohuanda Equineart   If you aren't drooling by the end of that, you're dead!  On the other hand, I wasn't all that thrilled by Charro saddles when I started this order, yet now...  Oh now...
It has the challenge of something a miniature saddler can really sink their teeth into.

 Next was tooling the fenders.

The patterns seem to be a combination of traditional floral motifs and swirlies and mildly geometric intercrossings, almost Celtic (the strap).  This is the second time I've run across this particular phenomenon:   Interlacing geometric patterns, such as are found in Celtic knotwork, look exceedingly good on Spanish and Peruvian tack.  The first is in the TSII Peruvian sets.  See our website.. Timaru Star II Peruvian page 2

The scallops on the edge of the fenders was all cut by hand.  I did it in our local Toyota dealership...

What I've really enjoyed is the checkering on the fenders.

I'd known from the beginning that, while these are made with leather (or rawhide) lacing in full scale, they could not be made by interlacing at one-ninth scale.  Not by me!  I made the slits with my largest needle chisel.  The thread is the same as that used on the reins: waxed linen.  It has that old-ivory color, that ancient-linen off-white creamy color that goes so well with these old dark saddles.  One arm's-length of thread was the perfect length to go three times along one fender.

Close up it's clear it's made from passes of thread; but even at a short distance away, the effect is (I think) acceptable.

I had to make up some of the tooling on the flap of the fender... my references didn't show more than the bottom third.

Here is the finished product.  I'll have to lace-tie the strap ends together... there is not room for a buckle, neither vertically (in the thickness of the straps and the tree) nor in the length of the leather straps themselves.  My reference absolutely shows no buckle, so all I've got to go on is experience of how Old West parts of saddles were tied together.


And now for something completely different.  A friend was admiring my neckerchief slide, and I let her talk me out of a short order.

The first one, on the left, wasn't quite right.  But I was having so much fun I kept going.  There is a braided-leather core inside these slides.

Having filled an order in less than two days, it has now taken nearly two weeks to contact the customer, and we still haven't gotten together!  Frustrating and foolish as this is, it's a pleasant change of pace for me.  It is very important, sometimes, to succeed at something...!  when the rest of your life is stuck...
But fear not.  Progress is being made.  Things are, in fact, going well.  Next post should have more details on this extraordinary saddle, TSII #451.

Goehring Stirrups

I learned a very important engraving lesson with these stirrups.  It will be forever impressed (I almost said engraved) upon my mind.  It will also be connected with the movie I was watch/listening to at the time, which was Hiyao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro.  I don't have pictures of exactly what happened, only before and after -- but oh Lor', never again!
But to begin at the beginning.
Every big project has to start somewhere.  Thanks to Alison and Jennifer I had the tree.  Thanks to other factors, I'm finally starting to have some time, although 'tis a fraction of what I could spend on model tackmaking!  And thanks to some odd idea of working from edges inwards, I eventually decided to start this monster saddle with the stirrups.  Once it was broken down into parts, things began moving.
I'd better show you the reference.

This is the real Clyde Goehring stirrup.  The white checkering is present on both sides of the foot rest drop, front and rear.

Paper patterns are what I use.  This is a critical step, to practice with before actually cutting leather.  The bottom patterns here are for the stirrups; the rightmost one came first.  I knew I wanted to use the sheet aluminum ("Create With Metal") I'd gotten at Hobbytown USA.

Although the reflections are bad, you can detect a strip cut off from the lower right corner.  It was easy enough to bend this strip into a U shape.  It was very hard to drill holes through it.  This took a long time.  I knew what I wanted to use for the neck:  None other than a bamboo skewer I'd snuck home from an Asian restaurant!!  Ah, recycling at its finest...

The decorative pattern on the real stirrup was somewhat mystifying.  I'd rarely seen anything like it:  triangular groups of dots.  Grapes?!  In the stamping, they simplified themselves, a skill I don't know how to explain, other than to say that 10 groups just wouldn't fit.  At this point all was well. 

 It was time to try out my ideas on the checkering.  Like so many tackmaking solutions, this one came to me in the middle of the night, out of nowhere.  I knew I couldn't use leather interlacing -- the material has its limits, as does my patience!  But the soft Amish harness thread seemed to hold promise.

 And it worked.  It even had that weary-worn look.

At this point, a most enticing idea crossed my bows.  Should we not try to engrave the little beasties?  Fatal choice!!!

This is the "before" picture.
Take it from me kiddoes:  Choosing to engrave these stirrups AFTER putting the necks and leathers on them, burying them in a huge lump of plastic, was WRONG!!!!  BAD IDEA!!!  Oh, I thought I was clever:  I knew better than to put Thermo-Loc right against the leather, and embedded them in paper towels... but Oh, OH, DID I calculate the consequences of burying a 3-dimensional, inch-square leather-covered object in solid grey plastic??
DID I realize how hard that stuff would be to get OFF??
No, gentle reader.  Not at all.
It took an hour to free just one.  An hour of tiny little cuts, shaving the Thermo-Loc off bit by bit, aware every stab how easy it would be to cut either myself or the stirrup, making a pile of thin grey scrapings.  The Thermo-Loc could not be saved.  It is a miracle I saved the stirrup.  The second one took only 20 minutes.  There was some damage, but nothing that couldn't be glued or Edge-dyed.
Whew...

I only engraved one side, my own compromise.  The result was lovely and it matched the rest of the bridle and breastcollar.

These stirrups are incomplete.  Neck leather wraps are still needed, as well as conchos.

This extremely handy tool is my circles template, a heritage from my drafting days in college.  I have used this more than any other drafting template in tackmaking, throughout the history of the TSII.  Note my last name inked on it:  the 'N' is not curved, something very early in my career as a draftsperson, before I developed my "hand" (handwriting).

The scissors are my 'tin snips,' an old sewing pair kept exclusively for cutting sheet aluminum.  The tiny circle of the concho is at the upper right of what I'm holding.

One down, eleven more to go.

Cary Nelson's Charros

I was greatly privileged to photograph some outstanding tack during the Artisan's Gallery last BreyerFest (2013): two Charro sets by fabulous master tack artist Cary Nelson.  This post is also intended to push me a little further on my own Charro saddle quest.  Nothing like somebody else's tack to inspire you!  Haven't I said the best reference is another model tack piece?  It so happens (why do I have to be human!?) that I'm good and stuck on my Goehring Charro saddle...
I spent a lot of time drooling over these two fantastic pieces.

We should be familiar by now with Cary Nelson's calibre of work.  What I hadn't seen before was this particular subject.  Even after 33 years in the hobby, I very rarely see Mexican saddles.  These are about as far from those miserable rear-view-mirror hangers-on you can get.  :)

I spent a lot of time staring, close up.  At the time, I could figure out most everything,... eventually... but not the trees.  Cary wouldn't tell me.

 She created two Mexican style Charro saddles, apparently within the past year -- on top of all her other accomplishments!  See the end of this post for a glimpse of those.  The first saddle is this one decorated with what can only be the best model scale pitiado I have ever seen in my life.

OKay, so I've PhotoShopped some of these a little... I had a bit of camera shake, and used the Sharpen feature a couple of times.  Still you can see that this is no mere paint-on or even glue on.  These are real stitches, imitating the real cactus fibre used in pitiado work.  Think embroidery on leather. 

This first saddle includes a breastcollar, a bridle, a hackamore with leadrope and a fine lawn blanket.  The below pic shows the breastcollar and hackamore.  It's my worst in terms of shake; apologies.

 These two saddles are proudly owned by Colette Robertson, who I am sure literally pounced on them when they were first revealed.

The second saddle -- oh prepare yourself! -- could be described as pitiado in silver.

Museum quality anyone??!!  The black background helps.  But believe me, the quality in the handwork makes the whole thing kind of shimmer.  I know, who better, how much effort has gone into this...

And I also know that I do NOT know just how she did it!!  Some I can guess; the beadwork on the skirts (bastos), the silver on the horn and stirrups, and the cinches (notice there are two cinches for this saddle alone).  But some I cannot.  And that is how it should be.

Honestly, it looks like applique - cut out and fastened on -- but it could also be actually stitched in.

This shows the cinch with the tassels.  This is the only place, in my opinion, where the quality of the tack suffers just the teeniest bit.  The frizzies don't hang or lie very well.

The rest of everything is drop-down gorgeous outstanding. 

Once again the saddle was supplied with both a hackamore and a bridle.  The breastcollar in this case is formed from a pair of cinches.  You see this sometimes with Western saddles; I first saw it in a Denver Saddlery Catalog.  Those blue triangles are not painted, but actually stitched.
The knotwork on the hackamore alone must've taken weeks.  Cary told me "about a month for each set" but there is a lot of "about" here...

Probably from exhaustion, the rawhide bridle is somewhat plain.  But the bit is good and the reins certainly match the rest of the outfit.
Remember I said Cary Nelson had "other accomplishments" to show off?  Here they are:  a complete rack of Arabian Costumes!!  Other bloggers have documented them -- see Heather Abounader's Desert Night Creations -- so I'm contenting myself with just my one shot.  It gives an overall view of an entire man-year of work.  I'm some kind of awed:  I doubt very much I could match such an output.

Naturally, after all that, I had to try and shoot Cary herself.  Problem is, like most artists, she's camera-shy.  I couldn't get her to turn around in the time I had.

Cary's on the left, and Sandy Nyce on the right, facing.  Given that look in her eyes, something amazing must have been said.  Since this is Artisan's Gallery at BreyerFest, it doesn't take much imagination to figure out the subject...
***********

So I've been stuck on my Charro for much too long.  But hope is at hand.  Last week I took delivery of a cast plastic RDLC Mexican Charro tree, courtesy Alison Beniush!!!  The world's Lesser Rio Rondo!!  Not so lesser... there is so much there, and I hadn't known about it!!!  My own hobby is bounding around my ears...  Hopefully this little piece will help me bust my logjam.
Meanwhile keep tacking.