CG: Almost There

 Progress has moved so far forward on this saddle!  I'm struggling to keep up the blog.  When last seen, there were only two sets of strings, no front girth apparatus and no blanket!  The blanket, you can see, has been happily solved -- by another artist, outside the hobby!  But I want to start in chronological order here... and that means going back to those main cinch rings.

 We returned to State College on the 30th of January.  Shortly afterwards, I made these two rings.  They are sterling silver on the front, with cast whitebrass rings in the back -- engraved ones, almost surely purchased from TWMHC.  I'd had them kicking around for some time, and now, because I wanted the bar at the bottom to have some sort of decoration on it (not be plain), I decided to use them.   They had the further desirability of being cast -- of not having a seam -- so they could withstand pull and stress.  I wouldn't have to solder them shut.

Despite Luis' extraordinary collection of pictures, there are some things you just don't see.  One of them is the back of the Mexican Charro-style girth rings.  God only knows what they look like in real life.  The best I could find was a sidewise view.  But function can dictate appearance (and usually does).  They had to be open enough to allow passage of the suspending straps, the ones that wrap around the tree shoulders.  And they had to come together again at the bottom, because there the rings only support the cinch strap: the latigo strap, just like American Western saddles.

Making the suspending straps, which I called the main girth straps (above), was relatively easy.  The hard part was the lining, and even then it was merely getting things small enough.  Patience was required, but the design work was behind us -- the conchos taught us the material, and the skill called up the X-Acto knife.

This is a blast from the past.  I'm using heat from the red lamp to "hot-oil" the cinch latigo straps, a procedure covered in my Guide [Guide to Making Model Horse Tack].  That yellow stuff is a can of Super 7 leather dressing.   It smells like honey.
Don't go talking about the undesirability and shortage of incandescent light bulbs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At this point, something extraordinary happened.

A saddle blanket dropped out of the sky.  Literally.
Manna from heaven.

I have a friend, Lizzie, who has taken up knitting as a hobby.  She had made me a pot-holder earlier.  She loved horses and knew about my little tack shop, but was not a collector.  I had told her the dimensions of a Western saddle blanket, but I certainly was not expecting anything!!!  I learned that her job required frequent flying, so to amuse herself while in the air, she knitted me this fabulous, incredibly soft, beautiful little gem.  This photo shows the true colors.  The red, green and yellow cover the spectrum and will go with any color horse.
I was amazed, astonished, delighted.  After a quick referral to another model tackmaker who knew more about old-style California saddle blankets than myself (thank you Heather!), I decided my Muse knew what it was doing when it fell madly in love with this blanket coupled with this saddle.
Oh the relief.

And now for the cinch.  Light at the end of the tunnel....

A lot of pictures were taken during cinch making.  Perhaps there is a dedicated blog post here, but for now I'll just include a few.

Thank you Carol Williams.  The idea for the "rack" comes from her.  ("It's a Cinch!")  The skill of tackmaking keeps evolving, so I confess my cinches are now a bit beyond what I've shown in my Guide.  I use this rack instead of hanging them off the anvil.  And in this case, there wasn't any interweaving -- just the color stays.

Even this picture is out of date.  While it shows the central stay and its rings, it doesn't show that I had to replace one of the rings with a much larger one.

But it does show feeding the end of the floss in under the stay wraps.  No knots!!

Making the leather covers for the cinch, clearly shown on my reference.  A little bit of personal, sidewise story:  the lower right covers are made of scrap leather once used on my family car's canoe racks, as padding.  Leather!! one of the world's most recyclable materials...

Voila!  In this picture the concho strings are much too long.   In fact the whole saddle's strings are too long.  Chop chop clip clip point point.  A whole lot of little adjustments happen when you finally put the thing together and fit it on a horse.  Far better to find out if it's going to behave NOW, whilst on the tackbench and in my own hands, than have the customer find out!!   It's not just a pretty-looking miniature, it's a working model, so everything has to actually fit...
The martingale was too long, for instance; and the cinch center ring too small.  Strings too long.
Et al.

And then I realized I hadn't signed it.
The last saddle I signed was the Golden Sunburst back in September of 2011.  Mein Gott, three years...  I can hardly believe it...  And before that, the last saddle I'd signed was in 2009!!  oh my again...  2010 and 2013 really did tear me up...

This photo shows how I carved my initials on the bare tree, something I've never done before.  It also shows circled the year, 2014, cut into the front part of the second skirt extension.

This is the off side.  It shows the saddle number, 451, on the tree.  (The four-hundred-and-fifty-first Western saddle I've made since 1979.)   The circled area also has a 451 carved into it -- extremely hard to see.

This tiny space, under the fender on the base plate, is the traditional place where I sign my saddles.  Alas and alack, there was barely any room on the Goehring; and what marks I did manage to make don't read very well.  I did sign the near side with SBY, but it didn't behave at all.  Hence cutting the tree.  Also, the underside is inked with initials and date.  Drafter's ink, guys, in case you're worrying (rightfully) about pen ink.

So, why am I saying "Almost There?"  Isn't it done?  After a year and a month, isn't it done yet??

Introducing the fancy latigo keeper.
Remember the original reference picture?

For some inscrutable reason, there's always one part of a model saddle that fights to the end -- that I sure wish I could put off.  The blanket and this keeper are it for this one.   I'm actually afraid of that keeper, partly because I didn't know what it was for the longest time (I still don't understand exactly how the back of it goes!) and partly because its size means it's gonna be the hardest part to make.  Such is fate.  I can guess how it folds and tucks -- thanks again to Luis and his Flickr pictures -- so I've just got to buckle down. 
A week in Tucson will be a breathing space.  After a year and a month, another week is no big deal.  But I'd sure love to finish this out.   It has definitely reached the stage of being called "you stupid saddle" and with me, that's a sure sign of an approaching end... !

Look what's next!

The blue headstall...
I can hardly wait.
Thank you, Sue, for your patience.

Granger and Teller: Rawhide Bridle approaches

 Today's post -- actually a peek at my tack collection -- concerns just two model bridle makers and one style of headstall.  It also answers the burning question Why You Should Never Freeze Your Glue!!  Oh, the adventures of a wandering tackmaker...

The two artists are Margaret Teller, regretfully gone from us now (I should say, making tack in another dimension), and Shannon Granger, delightfully alive and well but probably not taking orders!  Shannon comes first, because today I put together the piece you see above.  I had picked up the reins at BreyerFest 2012.

So much happens inside the ballrooms at the (then) Holiday Inn North!!  now, the Clarion Inn!!  I can remember NAN being held there..  ahem... In that space (just right of the door), during the Artisan's Gallery of 2012,  on July 19th, I had the great pleasure of meeting Shannon Granger, publisher/editor of Model Horse Performance Magazine.  We had corresponded a lot, but I'd never seen her.  A Scandinavian, was my first thought... followed by, How sweet, how nice, how disciplined!  She had brought a selection of peices for sale.  One of my collecting goals is a piece from every noteworthy tackmaker I like, not a small ambition when you've been in the game as long as I have (thirty-six years this June).  But really I just wanted those reins.  They were only $50... believe it or not, all I could afford.
To her credit, she tried very hard to get me to trade, but I was learning 'cash is cheaper than my time' and in the end she let me talk her into the sale.

Sometime later in 2012 (my only clue is an email of mine dated Sept 18 that mentions it), Shannon posted a small contest on her blog.  Whoever made the most comments before her counter reached thirty thousand (I think) would get a small piece of tack.  Well, I had recently gotten bold about leaving comments -- in hindsight, a step towards my own blog.  What a chance.  I must have left lots of comments because I won the contest.  I knew right away what I wanted.

It took a lot of talking.  I had a bit and reins.  All I wanted was a matching headstall.  Shannon was a tackmaker I respected, and to have her exploring my favorite form, the braided rawhide headstall, was a pushover for me.  But as you can see, it also took some patience.  Perhaps this is a good thing.

In the meanwhile, I was able to purchase a complete saddle from her in March of 2013, the Aqua Gaming set.

Photo by Shannon Granger

I was so impressed I did a blog post on it.  Spring Colors
The above 2014 picture shows a tiedown for this very set.  I'd had no idea it even existed until I opened the package two days ago.  Some artists can hold ideas in their heads for a long time.   This should NOT surprise me -- !!!  I am still deeply touched.

So the headstall arrived and I put it together with its reins, made two years before.   The bit is from a friend, similar to those marketed by Marsha Ensor and probably a copy of those marketed by Robin Clark many long years ago.

Shannon kindly listened to me wanting certain decorative elements: the buttons on the tied brow.  She hadn't done such a thing before.  The design of this headstall is the classic Old West sliding doubled loop.  I'm still not sure it has a name... I learned about it in Tom Hall's Western Tack Tips books, and had seen it earlier in museums and books.  These two tackmakers, Shannon and Margaret, are using candlewicking to execute it in miniature scale.  The great part about this design is that it can be completely adjusted without any buckles or hardware.

As soon as this bridle was completed, I turned to my collection and pulled out Margaret Teller's piece, ordered at BreyerFest of 2002, down paymented then, balance paid in September, and arrived on Halloween.

Same material, the offwhite candlewicking.  Same design, a Western headstall that adjusts with no buckles.  Same scale.  And, same price -- fifty dollars -- how about that.

It even used embroidery floss as adjunct materials, in this case the mecate (leadrope).  But here the similarity ends.  Margaret made her buttons with wrappings of matching-color thread, and drew on the interweaves with a colored pen.  Her design is simplified.

Yet when I first saw these pieces, my reaction was the same:  I had to have them.  Does anyone really understand this passion?  Or the pleasure in seeing different approaches to the same thing, the variations on a theme that is the heart of all collections?  I have loved and enjoyed and yes played with Margaret's bridle and hackamore (I was lucky enough to get two pieces that year from her) ever since, which is to say, for the past 12 years.  They've stood the test of time.  Will Shannon's piece do the same?

There are other tackmakers who have used this material to do miniature rawhide braidwork.  It is a splendid sub-collection within the model braidwork canon.  Two names that come to mind are Kathy Wiggins and Linda Spiesschaert.  I have photographs (remember those things!) which I should digitize some day...

MEANWHILE, didn't somebody mention FROZEN GLUE?????

Y'all know I spent two months in New York, and just came back home to central Pennsylvania (Jan. 30).  My family is efficient and we were packed up a day in advance.  I knew cold would not hurt the horses and so they and the tackshop all went out into the truck the evening before.  We had to leave the next morning bright and early.  The cold snap was back in action, but I honestly did not think anything in the tack shop could be hurt.
Was I ever wrong.
What good is it to be dinky and careful about saving glue?!?  In my defense, the bottle does not say "Do Not Freeze," and I had no idea white glue would react this way... this had never happened to me before...  but oh, my, how suddenly solid it all got... 
the consistency of cheese spread.

I dug it out -- talk about recycling, in this case the bottle itself -- refilled the glue with a larger bottle I happened to have (you can see it above right) and rolled on.  Lesson:  use easily-obtained materials if you possible can.

Here is a link detailing a bit about my husband's job while we were up there.
OWLeS: Ontario Winter Lake-effect Storms, by Channel 9 Syracuse
He is in the airplane.

Silver Progress on the Goehring

A great deal of progess has occurred on the Clyde Geohring saddle, mostly of the silver persuasion!  And what a relief that is...  Start with the horn cap.  I apologize for taking pictures so late in the game; this is the only one of the horn cap by itself, and clearly it's upon completion!  Like the breastcollar conchos, this piece is of solid sterling silver, and was engraved all by hand.  Unlike those conchos, this is the first (and nearly last) time on the whole saddle when markings are placed inside the petals of the central flower.  There was space.
The horn cap is affixed with a pin (cut short) driven through the middle and into the resin tree, as well as being glued with Ambroid.
What you can't see here is the incredibly long time it took to fit this disc of metal to the non-flat surface of the horn.

Next is the cantle plate.  I had had the paper pattern for some time.  Again this pic is late in the game; the blank is already cut out and starting to be bent and fitted.  It's a complex curve, the most difficult of all to fit.

A familiar sight:  it doesn't match!!  How hard, how hard to gently tease and work and bend and twist a  very heavy piece of metal so that it fitted snugly to the tree.  I was filing down the tree too.  Hammering, tapping, using the dappling block, everything I know and all my patience, and even then it makes your hair turn gray how long it takes. 

Initially I tried to secure this huge chunk of silver, the single largest piece I've ever made yet for a model saddle, to the vise with its pegs.  Didn't work.  I had to melt all my Thermo-Loc and make a big old block instead.  Even with this it managed to unset itself twice during engraving.
Again, what you can't see is how difficult engraving a convex surface was.  Whether I'd lost my touch, whether my gravers were dull, or whether it was that outward-curved surface, it took me 3 days to do this.

I didn't have enough silver for the pommel, something I'd known from the beginning.  What I was aiming for originally was heavy-ga. aluminum [AL].  What you see here is my first try.  That stuff was as solid as concrete to work with at this scale. 

It may look O.K., but trust me, it wasn't.  I had no way to curve it further, handle it or work with it, and I couldn't close the gap of the dart.  I was completely unable to achieve the little 'bump' of the shoulders, so carefully sculpted and filed on the resin tree.  How to solve the intractability of the situation: super-heavy, unbending materials, yet poor access with limited lightweight tools?

With old technology, that's how.

Some folks might say I was cheating.  What, not solid silver or Argentium or even solid AL??  After all the rest of this saddle -- !!!
But remember the TSII tagline:  Anything goes if it looks right.  Using multiple layers of very thin AL sheet molded to the surface, allowed me the access and control I needed, and saved, used, enhanced!, those little bumps.  It retained all the work that went into them, instead of requiring that work to be done all over again.  I had extensive experience with the stuff [silver tape] and just because it hadn't performed perfectly in all the applications we greedily expected it to (it broke, it fell off) didn't mean there wasn't a place where it shone.  If there was one perfect application, this was it:  resin pommels.  "Every hoss has jus' one race in dem, honey, jus' one."  (from The Phantom Filly by George Agnew Chamberlain, 1942.)  The place where silver tape did NOT fall off was where the foundation was NOT leather (no oxygen exhange!), where things did NOT flex whatsoever, and where the tape was held down by something else.  In this case that would be the girth straps.  So I plastered several layers on, squeezing out the air and darting them to fit the curve, cutting as I went.  As the patterns show, each layer got bigger, since it had to cover more.  I couldn't tell you how I did the darting (wrinkles); each layer dictated its own, and I cut their edges with the X-Acto and smoothed everything down with the fid.

The original reference showed the pommel silver in two halves, so that's how it went.  I would pin it later, as a backup hold-down.  This application was the first time I'd put more than 2 layers down... ultimately I used 4.

And like an idiot, long ago I'd put the fenders on.  A mistake, I'm telling you.

Here is the front of the pommel silver, after engraving and pinning.  Although this material can't take engraving the same way as solid silver, one can still gain a respectable facsimile with a dull and sharp awl.  Take care! it is, in every way, a one-time-only material.  If I'd drawn wrong it would've been back to putting on a complete 'nother shoulder.
The pins had to have holes drilled for them, and that was a challenge, because of the adhesive gumming up the drill bit!!  Eventually I got past it...

Only now, after it's way too late to do anything about it, do I see that the rear view of the pommel silver shows a profound asymmetry on the tree.  That's what you get making miniatures by hand and eye.  Hopefully the seat and cinch straps will disguise it.

What's this?!!  I'm sick and tired of the skirts not being attached.  I had no real idea how to assemble this saddle until now -- believe it or not!!  Model engineering is often made up on the spot -- that's the fun of it...  Easy enough to tuck the tails of the tree into their pockets (between the skirts and conchos).  Almost impossible figuring out how to fasten the front down.  There's no skirt or flap to hold down the tree.  In the end I nailed it underneath.

This is slightly more recognizable.  The forward ends of the second skirts will be sewn over the fender straps (but only the insides).  I had to extend them twice.  Who says the master knows what they're doing...

This shows how the second skirt finally wound up.  Shaping those fenders is going to take a lot of patience, water, you-name-it!  They don't want to stay down...

Using the Pin Vise to drill a hole into the tree.  I've already holed the base plate/bottom skirt.

Oh I am really hoping it won't gouge the horse!!  I can't squeeze the pins in with pliers -- that would be to damage the pommel silver.  I can only press on these pins from one side, and push them inwards with my arm's strength.  Eh, there's always a blanket...

The reward.
Now at last I can start work on the cinch rings and straps.

Stringing Along and Concho Villa

Progress however incremental is still progress, right?!  I thought I'd share a little bit about the saddle strings and conchos, which is where we are right now on this more-than-a-year-long, ever-so-slow saddle project.  Incidentally, that horse is now mine!  I was borrowing him before, but since it was the second time I'd borrowed an Alborozo for a long saddle project (the first was the Domo Vaquera)... and since I've spent so much time staring at him, working with him...  you know, one gets awfully fond of them under such circumstances... well...  I got lucky; she was willing to sell.  Thank you, Helen.  I'm thinking of naming him SnowHammer.  New Yorkers will know why.

 To begin with, the strings I'd cut out before January 2 were of the wrong material!  Wanting to depict the texture of deerskin (I'm pretty sure that's what they are), I had thought of using strips of very thin skiver.

I was very proud of my superthin skiver --it was exactly the right color and would drape perfectly.  Why I was blind to its durability under the stress of construction is one of those embarrassing questions I'd just as soon not answer.  Suffice to say when I started drawing it through the conchos, it tore.  It broke up and ripped every inch.  I had to abandon it.

 This is a selection of the conchos I will be using.  The ones intended for the back skirts are the ones with a single hole in the center.
And now for adventures in photography of Very Small metal objects.  I wanted to show what I'm doing to refine, even more, these tiny handmade bits of Aluminum.  What is the secret?

With this first picture (above), several facets become apparent.  You are looking through my magnifying lens.  That long grey thing is my smallest rattail file (yeay Friedrich Dick!).  The concho on the right is the refined one.  I'm chamfering, that is, smoothing and rounding, the inner edge as well as the outer.  But the picture is overexposed.

This is a better shot... except it's somewhat out of focus.  No tripod.  But it best shows the refinement.

This one was shot manually (no tripod), thus too dark, lightened up with PhotoShop, and zoomed.  It shows the inner chamfering best.  (The graininess of the picture is inevitable.)  I'm using my own fingers as a vise to hold the little things; a glancing pass with the file is about all I can manage.  They're better in person.  These tiny details add up in model tackmaking.
The second time around I thought of chamfering the UNDERSIDE of the inner edge, to make things easier for the lace. 
Why is there only one hole, when real life clearly uses slotted conchos?  And I did make some slotted ones... Ahh... you can't know how incredibly difficult they were to make, and how I kept breaking them.  In about seven tries I'd made 3, and I had to give up!  I decided that a single hole would work; otherwise not enough of the 'petals of the flower' would show.  The expansion or squeeze-y capabilities of leather would hold the conchos in place.

On the face of it, this looks like progress.  I used the before-mentioned skiver to make the leather conchos.  To my amazement they looked right the first time!  once-white scallop edge-lining.

But why on earth wasn't I trying to fit the tree when I put the conchos in place??!!

WOOOPS...!!!  The tree doesn't fit between the two skirts...!!  blush...!!  I had had my eye on the reference, which (go and look) showed the conchos "two checkers down from the join!"  Blind again... 
Now what?!?  The conchos must embrace the tree and hold the skirts down around it.

PhotoShop again:  the white dashes show where I've cut and modified the tree.  I also had to move the conchos upwards and cut new slits, ungodly amount of work.  But now it fits.
This shot (above) also shows how I've connected the fender straps.  It's a bit bulky but I felt I had no other choice.

The new strings, kangaroo lace, had their grain cut off.   Contrary to my usual practice, since bevelling helps so much to reduce lace to a good-looking miniature, I'm not bevelling them.  Why?  Because the original real life ones aren't bevelled. They're chunky buckstitching strips, and one reason they look so distinctively primitive is that very square edge... a detail often lost by most folks, even miniaturists.  I've made new leather conchos; the first ones disintegrated when I took them off to move the strings/conchos (the ungodly step).  The metal conchos go on last; I know from bitter experience that one string-half at a time is the only way I'll get them on.  Lick, slick, and slowly gently ease them on and pray you don't break them... it's like trying to squeeze a camel through a pinhole...

Got em on!
This time the tree fits!!

The incredible adventures those laces have gone through (being pulled through weensy conchos twice now, waxed, licked and scraped -- I foolishly don't have my Dr Jackson's, Super 7 or any other kind of leather dressing with me this week) have made them thinner, flatter and a good bit more like what I aimed for.  I didn't plan on that, but sometimes you get lucky.

In the course of the move to NY and this saddle, I wanted to bring my dapping block, but didn't want to drag a chunk of metal weighing several pounds.  Happily I remembered this little plastic one.  I'm dreadfully sorry I don't remember where I got it --!!  Tandy's?  The Gem Show?  Worse, I probably got it as a gift and then never gave it...  errr...  tomorrow...  It is much too handy as a travelling block.  I need it to dome the conchos, and maybe for some of the silverwork still to come.

Dapping is the act of doming, or curving to the segment of a circle, a portion of flat metal.  Usually you need special tools, which look like balls on sticks.  But at our miniature scale, the tip of a paintbruch handle will do.

Also, one usually uses a hammer to dap.  But again, at this scale, simple wrist pressure does the job.
I'm aware that this is a rather unsatisfactory picture to end on, so I'm going to be daring and include another.

Remember I said I finally owned the Alborozo?  Part of that deal was a tack trade... this bridle.  It is the last piece of tack I made in 2013.  May it be a good omen for the next year.
(Charcoal etch job by yours truly.)