Little things

Sometime last year, Anna Helt started selling stablemate scale western saddle trees and, since I love making stablemate tack, I thought, "why not?" and bought a couple.
Well, they have been sitting in a drawer for many months, until a few weeks ago, I decided it was time to do something about it.


And so, began the remaking of patterns, endless skiving, cutting and dying...

At first, I was somewhat apprehensive about trying something completely new in a scale that offers plenty of challenges.
Well, I was quite pleased with how easily everything came together.

Of course it's not perfect, very rarely when you try new things do you get it just right the first time.
Another one of the challenges of making this set, was using normal tooling leather, when I'm used to using skiver. I did a bit of stamping and attempted a little tooling, most of it was lost by the time the saddle was complete, but it did lend some nice details which I'm proud of.

Bridles are always a bit of a pain to make, I used some leather that doesn't match the saddle exactly, but it still looks nice.

One last thing worth mentioning, for the first time I tried adjustable stirrups in this scale, and it was a success.

I'm excited to start turning out some more mini tack in the near future, Breyerfest is right around the corner and I hope to have a sizeable inventory of sales pieces ready.

Hope to see you at Breyerfest! -Maddy