Carrizozo's Hackamore: Finished

 

Finished!  Carrizozo's Hackamore began August 30 with the spinning of some orange thread.  The piece went through a lot of adventure!  I feel it barely squeaked under the wire of my determination to complete it by the end of this week (Nov 12).  The good news is that in the final days, it helped shift and break up my next book logjam.  That tiny knot at the throat, the Fiador Knot?  I'd had my drawing wrong!!  This hackamore gave me the opportunity to get it right.  Thank you for your patience.

UP FOR AUCTION.   Listed on Model Horse Place.  Buyer pays shipping, estimated at $12.  Closes Friday the 18th, around 7:15pm Eastern.  Good luck, thanks for reading!

 Model Horse Place: Carrizozo's Hackamore

The photo session was long, and included 4 horses of what turned out to be two different scales.  I found out for sure that this hackamore, for all that they are very adjustable and that I'd intended it for Rapunzel and Elbe, really was best fitted to the smaller Nikolas and his equal, the Pony of the Americas.

Here's proof.  Elbe/Firefly manages to fit in by holding her breath.  See how tight the bosal is around her muzzle, how high up the browband is and how short the fiador ends are?  Needlenose pliers are a must-have to tie them.

Another problem is the off side.  The braided ring likes to ride up and touch the eye, something I detest.

Nonetheless she looks a proper Western mare in it.  The overall detail is good.  And the color---!!  

I couldn't help having fun with this girl, Rapunzel/Astrid, even though she is the same scale as Elbe and this hackamore was a bit tight on her.  (I could barely tie those fiador ends:  Me!)  I know, these photos don't give an accurate color.  In this whole post, the POA is the closest to the truth.  But this pony was irresistible.

I was particularly pleased with this portrait.  Doesn't she look sassy!

Finding a saddle for Nikolas was one of those activities that proves I certainly could live-show if I wanted; I just haven't done so for years and years.  I spent a long time pawing around, pulling a blanket from here, a cinch from there.  In the end the saddle didn't show much and the cinch not at all.  But it worked; the bright colors of the blanket subtly influenced the pix, and the horse did the rest.

Wouldn't this headgear look great on the Nikolas remake that Amanda Brock, of Rogue Horse Studios, just posted the sale of?...?

The real win came when I put this piece on Kandinsky, the little golden Appaloosa Pony of the Americas. 

I conga the POA.  I could as easily have put it on the original bay.  The more contemporary mane and the delightful detail of his color drew me to this underappreciated pony.  To my amazement, my camera did not turn everything overpoweringly yellow and saturated red; it showed him in his true colors.  Oooh lah lah, at last I had found the right model!

That expression!

This, then, was the proper 'opening shot,' the memorable one, that should be used for the auction link.

Here's the obligatory 'laid out' shots.  Believe it or not, the ends of the fiador are tied Wall knots.

And here's the equally-obligatory list of previous posts on this hackamore:

Carrizozo's Hackamore Begun

Carrizozo's Hackamore: Developments 

The making of this hackamore paralleled the real start of retirement for my family, quite a change.  The piece has gone on a pair of trips, one to AZ and one to NY.  It has been a bridge between working on my next book, stopping, and starting again.  This hackamore represents the first time I've tried braiding in this unusual scale between Trad (1:9) and Classic (1:12).  Carrizozo's proves to me that even while working on a dream book, it is necessary to sometimes go back to a simpler phase of just-make-it...  It also proves (as if one didn't know!) that having interested buyers means more than I care to admit.  :)  The pandemic is not over over here, and that is as hard as ever...  Sometimes I feel I'll be eighty for the next twenty years.  :(  My beloved hobby is a doorway into another world.  While I miss you all more than I can say, I am so very grateful for what I do have. 

This hackamore fought hard, and still feels a bit like something needs-to-be-fixed.  If the winner has the same opinion, they should get in touch with me.

More Pins

 With the arrival of Mishkazelle, Mink's latest Imperial Unicorn pin, my collection grew too large for one board (at least to my taste).  I made a new, though smaller, board, with very deep blue velvet, and put all the Mink Unicorns together.  My original brass unicorn remains with his old friends.  Really, how could he possibly blend in with these -- ?!  And Mystashani [upper left] now has her whitesilver moon upon her side.  :)

Above we see two Original Unicorns, two Celestials and two Imperials, to give them their Minkiewicz series names.  This post will be about 5 of my latest new pins:  a Minkiewicz and four Breyers (Arabian, Snowbird, Hope and Jewels).

Collecting pins seems to satisfy at least 4 criteria for me, one of them being affordability.  I spoke in an earlier post about how the Stein pin was my best chance to own one.  Now I am 'owning' the Snowbird Christmas Morgan and, seen below, the Jewels Fighting Stallion.  Another criteria pins satisfy for me is durability and archival quality, or lastingness.  (I need a word meaning permanent, aha, thank you thesaurus.)  It was a surprise to me when I realized I'd been, after all,  jealous of chinas  for a very long time;  and was collecting pins as one way to assuage this yearning, since I haven't yet allowed myself to collect chinas.  They are breakable.  Pins are so much less breakable.  The fourth criteria was sheer jewellike beauty.  Bright colors and gloss, metal and bling,... and tactile smoothness, which is like the final kicker for me (and part of why I like Glossies so much).

Here's a better photograph of the Snowbird pin, as well as the most interesting Black Malik (called merely 'Arabian' by Breyer).  Black is a very hard color to execute using enamels, yet I think Breyer did a good job here.  (Yes, that is a hair on the velvet.  I'm leaving it there to show they aren't just suspended in space.)

You're probably tired of being told how hard it is photo them so as to bring out the colors.  I was enchanted to discover Hope the Pinto Pony's tail was blue!  Amazingly, in both these next photos you can see it.  Another surprise was how large Hope is -- look at him next to the Big Ben (Brahms).  (Bouncer must've eaten his Weetabix that morning!!)  Probably Breyer wanted to get in all Hope's pinto details, such as the handprint on his rear.

You can also see the Cinderella castle, mentioned in an earlier post.

I think the Jewels pin is my first-ever rainbow Breyer horse.  To demonstrate (yet again) how hard it is to shoot these things, the photo below has no processing or PhotoShopping.

Photographing Mishkazelle had predictable results.  I defy anyone to find a bluegreen sparkle in common between these two shots of the splendiferous Rose Gold Imperial Unicorn.

You can finally see that my unicorn board really is a blue and not a black velvet. 

It seemed appropriate for all the Mink Unicorns, plus it just happened to be what I had!  Ah, the mother of invention...

I have made myself a spreadsheet of all Mink's enamel pins, drawn from her newsletters' data.  Data I am keeping track of include the date a pin is first mentioned (I call it 'date of first published' or '1st pub'), the date of its sale, the Series and Name, a description and the sale price.  I tried to keep track of how many were in the issue, but after Rainbow Zigby the answer stopped being always 50 and went to nothing (not mentioned).  Sometimes I add dates of further description in the 'first pub' column.  I also try to keep miscellaneous notes such as whether the pin was soft or hard enamel, the first screen printing, whether it was sold with 'mug bundles' and the like.  If anyone has questions about just the enamels, I could probably answer.   

How many are there?  Counting the 2 Teal FlutterPonies as one, and counting Jorannazazi (sale date tomorrow), but not counting those others who haven't been sold yet (that includes the Purple Hippicorn!), it's fifty-two (52).

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.

Carrizozo's Hackamore: Begun

 

I appear doomed to constantly edit my blog posts even after publishing, at least for the first few days.  That is the case here, -- just worse than ever before.  I know there is a Preview function to blogs, and I do use it;  but the rush to post always feels so much stronger than my hard-earned wisdom about polishing.   Bear with me, and thank you for returning.

This hackamore will be for sale.  When it's finished, a sale venue will be announced, here (this post) and on my two FBs.  Currently [10.30] I'm thinking of taking bids privately;  if that fails, a straight sale will be used.  See the penultimate [second-to-last] paragraph for more details.  Meanwhile, enjoy an in-depth history of this piece.  :)

For my NaMoTackMo project of this year, in April, I made an orange and green bosal, inspired by all the fuss about the color olive (it does not take much research to figure out the source of that).  That bosal wound up being gifted to the rider in question.  I remained inspired by the color combo.

 I simply loved that bright neon orange.  Never mind that to get the thread into braid-able form I had to hand-spin two together; I'd done that many times in the past, to get special colors.  But this color was just, so,... exciting.  It harked back to all my buck fever years* and forward to my running races.  It had birdwatching in the fall memories going back decades.  It was a breath of fresh air.  I really did need that.

And then Breyer had to come out with all these small Traditional-scale horses.  Astrid was the first, although Dundee was really heading in that direction (oh, Harley D?).  Then this year we had both Elbe/Firefly and Nicholas.  (Today known as the Standing Quarter Horse Mare and the German Riding Pony, thank you IDYB!)  I confess I was shocked at first when Lynn Isenbarger blogged that Nicholas was the same size as the Pony of the Americas.  I conga the POA!  But I was very slow to unbox my Nicholas, so perhaps I deserved that shock.  Yet he is so beautiful I was inspired...  I came home from BreyerFest with Rapunzel, Elbe and Nicholas.  It took til October before their names coalesced.  (Separate rabbit hole:  Rapunzel is Salona, Elbe is Salorcha and the little golden German Riding Pony got stuck with a long one:  Carrizozo Sugarfire.)  

 By August I had done enough work on my next book to have spun off extra parts (above).  Recall that the book is about documenting and reproducing eight pieces of headgear, including golden oldies for whom no notes existed.  I had to find out by trial and error what their measurements had been;  and that's how these extras, mecate and fiador, came out too short for the standard Trad.  Small Trads anyone??

On August 30 I started spinning thread for another orange bosal, sized for my 3 new molds.  In all of September, only the above part got done.  'Hope springs eternal' that I could ever make tack on trips...!  Well, that part of this piece at least is well traveled!  The above nosebutton went from PA to AZ and back again...  crossing the Carrizozo Lava Field in New Mexico.  Future blog subject...

And then, in October, I was finally able to buckle down.

I had been focused on Rapunzel as the mold for this bosal (thus the unusual pose of the photo), but it became apparent that she wasn't the best bosal-making horse.  Her neck was too arched to comfortably work under.  I switched to Nicholas / Carrizozo.

Things went faster after this.  The upper sidebuttons were the biggest challenge because they were embedded, that is, woven into the ends of the 3B nosebutton.  That took a few passes, including taking out pre-existing cores!  There's no formula for single interweaves in a 3B;  it's mathematically impossible.  So how did I do them?  I cheated.  I passed under an extra third of each interweave ring around; and this extra thickness made an effective core.  To my pleased amazement, my normal Trad-scale lower sidebuttons (5P4B) and heel knot (8P5B) were acceptably in scale.

As of October 28, the bosal is finished, even to a metal concho on the end (an engraved pin). All that's needed is a hangar (I spell this the airplane way, having an ex-pilot in the family).  My vision is of a slit-braided single headstall, but for decoration, how about a braided ring at the off cheek?

My vision of the headstall is changing, especially after talking with a friend last night [10.30] (thank you Ann).  I now want a flat braid tasseled browband, as well as the ring in the offside cheek strap.  'Delicate' is the keynote here, for such small horses.  Such a vision will add days to the finish time.  Rumours of a short (4 day) trip are swirling in my family.  Make tack on trips??  Quiet chuckling choking laugh... but right now it seems reasonable to shoot for the second week in November for completion.  Thank you for your patience!

*I fell in love with deer in the early 90s, possibly as a counterbalance to overexposure [burnout] of horses.  "Hunting was next to horses in the bookstore" and I'd always loved antlers.  To my way of thinking, there is a vast difference between non-hunter and anti-hunter;  this distinction arose for me then.  Hopefully someday I'll publish my encounter with Crazy Legs, Pennsylvania's most famous elk.

Pins & an Ice Cream Bowl

The best place to start is where your heart is.  Here's one small attempt to break up my blogging logjam.  There are 5 new pins in my collection, plus a most interesting piece of Mink merchandise, the Ice Cream Bowl.  I have many other subjects to write about (blogjam?!), but this is the most colorful.  Pins are, I'm coming to realize, where my heart is right now,... although tack will always reign supreme, and is just around the corner!

The new ones are the two Celestial Unicorns (upper left), the Cinderella coach set (lowest left) and the third-one-down Carousel horse in the upper right.

Let's start with the amazingly impressive Celestial Unicorns.

They are, as Sarah claims, unlike anything she's done before.  And yet they are so her.  The moment I saw their stickers, back in June (June 30th, the day my husband retired), I knew I had to have them.   There was an elegant simplicity, a sparseness of riches and purity about them, that instantly appealed.  One more automatic collect!  Ah me, as I said to another pin collector, Sarah has us by the short hairs...

Looking at my collection as a whole, I'm struck by the similarity between Ayerron, the Celestial Sun Stallion Unicorn, and my old brass unicorn in the lowest right corner.  Across decades, this pose and this breed, even the color and gender!, are the same.

Aureo Unicornis Rampant.

Here are two shots of Ayerron, trying to capture the sparkles inside his big shoulder flower and hooves.  It's almost impossible.  I lowered my camera's light exposure to its bottom and then held my mini flashlight in my left hand, trying to pick out the glitter.  I know from decades of trying to photograph laser-flash holographic tape (prism tape) that you must start with very low light.  But it still is hard, and shaky hands do not help!  Ayerron's coppergold metal shows up very well, but his sparkles really are not that green.  I think the green is an element of his yellow and this method of shooting enhances them.

Now I hope no one would mistake me as a critic of Sarah's work.  I love all her stuff.  Yet Mystashani is one of the very few times I think I could suggest an improvement in one of Mink's pins.  The original stickers show this Lunar Mare with a white Moon crescent on her side.  By the way don't these stickers show how wild the ride is for a collector!!  What else could accompany a pin order of Celestial Unicorns, but their stickers?  But who could have predicted they'd be so different?!  My second stallion sticker was a half inch taller and the mare was a different color, much lighter!

Possibly for reasons of affordability, or for other reasons, the pin Mystashani's defining Moon came out the same silver as her border curls rather than the glitter-white of her hooves and stars.  It made me think about inescapable constraints...

Her own border metal is silver, of course.  Somehow these photos make it look gold, and indeed gold goes well with purple, just as sometimes the Moon has a golden glow.  But it is really silver.  Shooting pins is challenging...  Maybe I just have to catch the reflections right.

But collecting them is endless fun.  What should turn up on eBay but a match to my other 2 decades-old mini-conga of Carousel horse pins?!  Despite having carousel fever for the better part of 30 years (if not for life, hah!), I had not known it existed.

It is not exactly the same style,... no letters of the company such as are on my first two ("S&G", "PTC"), no loop on the finial.  But it satisfied every one of my collecting parameters.  Astoundingly, it had never been removed from its original sealed plastic.

When you find something that exactly matches your collection but you didn't know it existed!,... you're in trouble.  :)  How many others are out there...

I'm trying to focus on horse pins that appeal to me, that have a high level of detail and realism and are well executed.  Animation is an obvious target because the way enamel pins are made emphasizes line art and pure-colored spaces.  The intersection between realism and animation is large, and here I must rely on my own desires to keep from buying everything horse-shaped I see (or even cute-animal shaped!).  Why not the portrait of Maximus from the movie Tangled?  Why not most of the Breyer pins?  Because I don't like them, that's why.  I only collect what I like.  The problem here is even such controlled things as my desires are so likely to shift, to evolve, to morph... We have a track record of hundreds of model horses... That collecting experience can only stand me in good stead.  I hope.

I spent several weeks trying to decide about, and then to purchase, this gem from an earlier time.  The seller was hard to contact. 

It turned out this was a set of 2, and ipso facto, I had to get both.  The second pin is the castle and can be seen in the group shots.

Now let us move on to the Bowl.

The Ice Cream Bowl came along right at a moment when I was realizing I'd passed up a bunch of chances on Mink's Dancing Horse pins.  I was reasonably flush (at that time!) and I'd never seen anything like it (are we just going to wear out this phrase?!).  Mink has offered a lot of stuff over the years, and I'd turned down drinking glasses, tree skirts, blankets, socks, water bottles and who-all knows what-else useful items, so why did this grab me?  Hard to say.  I cast around for a use for it --- it would not fit in the kitchen cabinets.  And then I knew.  I needed a better place for all those pin backs and cards that have been accumulating along with my growing collection.

Aha.

This bowl is really a mug;  it has a handle on the side you can't see.  Not a problem.  This may be my only way to possess a Sayida (the chestnut appaloosa Dancing Horse).

When I know them by name, that's a sign.  I'm smitten.

For now.

People & Places BFest 2022

 

I promised a post on people & places at BFest.  Most of these pix are impromptu and previously unseen.  Here you will find some of the friends I was so glad to see, places I have not shot before, and, of course, horses both live and model.  I am trying to document, rather haphazardly, my BFest, which was so unlike any of those that have gone before... recalling that I am a veteran of 29 BreyerFests, including the first.  I should lay these pix out chronologically; but instead, I'm going to start at the KHP on Friday morning.  Such haphazardness is truly indicative of the overall spirit of this year and captures pretty well how I felt.

I got onto the KHP grounds each morning by walking.  Not through the famous gate, but by the Rolex pond dam road, which was held by a single distracted guard against cars.  All I had to do was stroll over to the United States Dressage Federation headquarters and photograph its beautiful bronze sidepasser [above].  If the guard saw me, she didn't react.   I had paid for my ticket like everybody else.

Rolex Lane, facing the parking lot

Between the Federation headquarters and the lane, there is a lovely lawn, with a charming little cottage-looking house in amongst the trees.  For some reason this scene strongly reminds me of family vacation places in northern IL (Channel Lake) and central MO (Lake of the Ozarks).

There are many ways onto the KHP.  In the course of the weekend I would converse with others who did not pass through the "official" BreyerFest gate, but came in on foot by various roads.  On Saturday this habit would deliver me to the Special Run tents forty minutes ahead of time -- early enough to get chased off by BF officials.  On that day I discovered some classes being held in the Rolex, and was drawn like a magnet.

Carrying a camera around your neck is a grand way to get closer to the arena.  Even better, the hour was early enough that there was nobody around.  That was my primary goal anyway.

There has been a time in my life when this kind of action would've compelled my most focused attention.  I love a harness pony!  I'm afraid I don't recall whether this was the winner.

Oh, what lovely harness!  :)

I'm going to go back to earlier in the week now, and start with my arrival on Monday.  To actually be there, in person, in KY, was almost overwhelming.  I have shot this view many times over the years, capturing, one by one, our cars; this time it was Moxie's turn.

See the pair of second-floor windows just left of center?  That was where I had my eyrie.  The first thing you do is put a horse in the window,... and make it visible.

Upon arrival my first real encounter was Teresa Rogers, whom I had never met.  Fellow blogger!  We stood on the asphalt, properly masked, and talked.  Over the course of the week, my defenses evolved to the point where, had I the chance to talk with her there again, I would not have masked.  Yes, this whole post is an emergence story.

I spent an ungodly amount of time (days!) worrying about where to visit with Eleanor on Wednesday.  All for naught.  Jennifer P. showed me the perfect place.  This partially-caught photo can be put down to nerves and shyness (I'd last seen her in 2020);  afterwards, it reminded me of the famous book jacket portrait of Terry Gross ("All I Did Was Ask").

Caroline was, surprisingly, an easier target.   (Kim BT evaded, I'm not sure how.)

Among many wonderful things to come out of this meeting was learning how to post FB pictures with my cell phone.  Thank you, Eleanor.  Two years is too long.

A place that hadn't always existed, but which came to be exceedingly useful, was this corridor:

It ran from the base of the 500-600s wing to the corner of the Paddock, and at the end a side door led outside.  Now you were at the Outback, ("the north side of the 300s") practically at the other side of the hotel;  you had completely skipped the central area and the 100s.  The cold white lighting and scarcity of people made it look haunted, and I started thinking of it as the Science Fiction hall.  I wound up using the SF hall quite a lot.  For example, I used it to quickly reach Paola Groeber's room in the 400s:

She is another great hobbyist I'd never met.  At least these ships didn't quite pass in the night--!

I regret I didn't get a shot of Heather M.  Visiting her was a milestone in terms of companionship, tackmaker-hood, and emergence from covid-fear.  That really was the first time I was unmasked inside (tho not the Clarion; another hotel), in the presence of another (who was not family [but should have been!], for the entire afternoon.  Our visit took place on Tuesday, the same day I was shooting the Coldstream Campus rather obsessively.  Other blog posts record this indulgence :) but here are a couple more:

Heather knows how to comfort you when you've cracked your first cell phone screen.

Wednesday evening saw me take another small step, literally across the hall.  Someone new was there, Danielle Feldman, a truly wonderful friend (and customer!).  In the course of that lovely visit, I learned to sit still in someone else's room with the door open, while strangers wandered in and out.  (Recall I could not do this with my own room.)  Danielle helped tremendously by masking.  In the course of BFest I would make her a gift of a white KN95 with gold bling on it.  Yea, it's just these small steps that mark my path back towards normalcy.  Two almost-strangers entered, Danielle introduced us, and one said, "Oh we know YOU! the LEGEND!!"  I hid my face in my hands -- I didn't know them from Adam.

Thursday was a transition day.  All days were, of course, but this one more than most.  On the one hand:  Of course I hall-crawled, this was BreyerFest, what did he expect??!?  I went out, I plunged through crowds (none of them fully masked), I stuck my head & sometimes my body into strange rooms, I even spoke to strangers.

On the other hand:  Every trip out was planned.  (Very early Tues reconnaissance of doors helped!)  I kept them short and they had definite targets:  Paola Groeber's room for Bond tack, 143 for stickers.  The Resin Show to give gifts to Jackie Arns and Jennifer Buxton.  Over the course of the day it became obvious I had bought the line, Just wear your mask and carry on as normal.  As much as 30% at times were masking with me; no one else blings them though!!  I stopped and talked with people I knew; I dropped in on Linda Walters long enough to buy a book.  I hunted and found Stablemates.  I went to 143 twice, until I caught them open, and bought more than a dozen stickers.  They didn't know me from Adam.

Plunging into crowded halls after 12 noon became my limit.  Here I do not go.  I did stick my head into the Artisan's Gallery for about 2 minutes.  Most of the time, though, I was alone in the room.  It's restful, I ate and surfed and watched movies, napped and slept in there, and it allowed me to internalize my purchases.  Walking outside, another trick, encountered Liz LaRose, which was a pleasure.

Friday I went to the KHP and tested myself against crowds outdoors.

About the closest I can quantify it is as "three people at 30 feet."  This, like all else, is flexible and very rough.  Almost the first place I wound up was inside a tent!  I actually asked Darlene if she was vaccinated;  this was the first time I've asked anyone in more than a year (and probably the last ever).  (She said yes.)  The ventilation was good, and, after some pondering, I took off my mask and sat there, reveling.

Tack by Darlene Stoddard.  Excuse the fingerprints; he is inside a Plexiglass cage.

Outdoors is free, no mask.  Wandering over the familiar grounds, I came across the Master of Volunteers, Robin Briscoe.  She let me take her picture.  I think all those pins on her lanyard have influenced me subconsciously.  :)

An astonishing thing happened on Saturday.  Just below the center of the next picture is a hillside.  I was camped out there for lunch, looking out over the beer garden, when a fellow picnicker approached me and introduced herself as Kathryn Johnson:  She for whom I had rebuilt TSII #413, the saddle I'd worked on for many months last year.  I had never met her.  That was glorious, to say the least!

Rolex dam pond road looking north towards the arena

I started out this post promising Places.  Here are some I found Saturday and Sunday.  I have, over the years, extensively wandered the KHP, but I'd never been in some of these.  This first place was near the edge of the parking lot.  I was sitting on the stone wall, under the giant trees, using the phone.

I was quite close to the American Hanoverian Society headquarters.  The bow on the head says everything.  :)

There is a graveyard on high ground to the right as you travel from the Visitor Center and Museum of the Horse in the direction of the All-Tech.  I had honestly never seen this before.

It seemed so peaceful. 

It is a fitting tribute to a great horse of the past.

At this point I can make a prophecy for people like me.  Go about your normal business, wear a mask and nothing else changes.  The world has done it all along.  Open your doors, mingle with the crowds, all will return.  And somewhere in 2024 or 2025, I'll hang up my mask.  And then the Great Pandemic will be over for us.

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In Other News:

 My promised trip to Boulder has morphed, courtesy Dad's Covid fears about having our nephew in that house, into a trip to Tucson instead.  No model people visits are planned, most sorry;  I need to be with my parents this time; we don't know how much longer we will have with Mom.  This means a near-month hiatus with the book (furious frown).  It also means a great chance to work on my Nikolas-sized bosal hackamore (delighted grin).  The nosebutton is well along.  This piece will be sold upon completion.

Happy Valley Fun Show is undecided, although I'm leaning towards cancellation again.  I don't see me strong enough to demand, let alone enforce, masking of all entrants, and at this point that's still what it would take.

But I can wait four years for a show.