Blog
October 2006
I need some crafty help
Every once in a while, I get the urge to be crafty. Unfortunately, while I have good ideas sometimes, the execution can be… lacking. For example, my drawing abilities:
That’s a horse. Just in case it isn’t obvious.
But on to my problem: we have a barn show coming up. Which includes a costume class. Which would be a lot of fun, despite the fact that I am twenty-something and not, oh, six. I don’t want to be judged–all the kiddies can have the ribbons–I just want to dress up.
I have a pseudo-highwaywoman costume already. Mostly, it’s a very cool cloak and a toy sword. I find those are sufficient–everyone is so impressed by the cloak and sword they don’t even ask why I’m wearing sneakers and jeans. I could dress up in that, but… meh. I’ve done that several years running and I’m tired of it.
So I thought I’d pull the old horse collar out of the garage. It’d be hilarious to dress myself up as the horse and the horse as the farmer.
Well, “hilarious.” I’d laugh, anyway.
I think my half of the costume would be easy enough–a horse-head hat, a tail, some solid-colored clothes, the horse collar. It shouldn’t be too hard to fix a straw hat on the horse’s halter. The only thing I haven’t figured out is how to make it look like the horse is wearing overalls and/or a plaid shirt.
My first thought was to make some sort of thing that would go over the head/sit around the withers/neck with two long bits to go down the legs. I thought about loosely tying them around the legs to make them look more like pants, but after thinking about the horses I’m likely to be dressing up… bad idea. They’d be less than amused.
So if you have any ideas (or even pictures of others who have done this), let me know.
How do you dress a horse up as a person?
Videos on Dressage
Following the post on Books on Dressage, I was asked via email if I know any good videos on dressage.
I’m afraid I know even less about videos than I do about books to recommend. On the forums (when in doubt, see what a bunch of stranges have to say…), when videos come up people say “pick your favorite instructional video” and go from there. I can’t find any old threads where videos are discussed in detail.
On a whim, I did try NetFlix. You never know. Turns out, in a search for dressage, Star Trek, the Original Series, Vol. 16-28 comes up. I’ll leave it to you to find out why, but I think we can scratch NetFlix off the list.
A Google search for “dressage video reviews” did come up with a helpful site: Classical-Dressage.net. Scroll down on the menu on the left to find the “Video Reviews” link.
One bad thing about this site: they don’t list which videos they’ve reviewed in any way I can see, so you can’t jump quickly from review to review. But at the bottom of each review page, they have a link to the next video review. I don’t know how many reviews they have total, but they have at least three–just keep reading the reviews, scrolling down, and clicking to the next one.
I didn’t see any other very promising sites in the top ten results (Equisearch has a book and video review page, but it looks like they mostly have book reviews. You can try the site, though, and scroll through all the results–there might be videos in there somewhere). But if you have particular videos in mind, you can always search for them +review and see if anything comes up.
You might also try talking with your local tack store–sometimes, they have videos to rent out. This way, you can preview them and, if you find one you like, you can always buy a copy. If the tack store doesn’t have videos to rent, the owner might still know which videos are ordered the most often–at least you’d know what was popular, even though that doesn’t always mean good.
And a last-ditch option is to try E-Bay. You should be able to buy videos cheaply. If they work for you, great! If not, you can always resell them on E-Bay. You might be able to get back at least part of the cost of buying the video in the first place, and even if you don’t, at least you won’t have spent as much money as you would have buying out of a catalog. Just be careful with E-Bay–most sellers are legitimate, but there are scammers on there. E-Bay has FAQs and help pages that deal with scammers, I’m sure, so take some time reading them if you aren’t familiar with how the E-Bay scammers operate/how to identify a scammer’s auction.
Ribbon Quilts: The Finished Products
This is what happens when I get bored in the middle of the summer and start asking questions like “How does one make a ribbon quilt, and can I do it?”
The large quilt is about 44×48 inches and has 115 or so printed ribbons in it (and various unprinted ribbons). The center block and the outer border are Zone and State awards and a few show Championships/Reserve Championships. The pattern is a modified Courthouse Steps.
The smaller quilt is about 18″ square and uses 19 printed ribbons (and various unprinted ribbons). The horse head is appliqued on–I sewed the brown ribbons together to make a block, cut out the shapes, and used iron-on fusion to hold them in place. Then I machine quilted with a zig-zag stitch over the edges of the applique. No seams to turn under or anything like that. Since the quilt is so small, I wanted to do something unique with it–hence the applique instead of a regular pattern.
How to make a ribbon quilt
When I was trying to decide what to do with my old horse show ribbons, I saw some quilts a professional makes. I liked the idea of quilts quite a bit, and she is a beautiful sewer, no doubt about it–but I couldn’t really afford the cost of having someone else make the quilt for me. I wondered if I could do it and decided the only way to find out was… to do it. (View the finished quilts)
Pattern Selection
If you aren’t planning to use all your ribbons, you need to measure them (length and width) and determine your total fabric “area” for each color. Then look through pattern books and sites, and find a quilt that will work with your colors/available fabric amounts. If you sew regularly, you might consider getting a program like Electric Quilt, which lets you design your own quilts–it would be easier to test out the different patterns with your available colors.
I was planning to use all my ribbons, including the championship and year-ends, so I just cut off all the rosettes and started laying out designs on the floor. I wanted to use all the printed parts of the ribbons and wasn’t worried about the rest, so I rearranged until I found a pattern I liked.
Prepping the Ribbons
Mine were very, very dusty and very, very creased, so I washed them in cool water with a very mild soap. Then I quickly ran the iron over them to get out the worst creases and left them to dry overnight. They turned out beautifully.
However, if the iron is too hot I found it would rub off the printing. If you don’t need to wash your ribbons, you might want to try ironing with a thin damp cloth between the iron and the ribbons–that might help with the rub-off that I was seeing (of course, my ribbons were also old; I’m sure that didn’t help).
Pay attention to any very crooked ribbons–those will be hard to sew and, if you can, you should put them in the “don’t use” pile.
Prepping the Machine
I bought new needles for the machine–as thin as I could get them. I didn’t want to make large holes, because ribbons tend to show the holes and not close over. Regular all-purpose thread worked great for me. I ran a couple of test ribbons (pink and purple unprinted pieces I wasn’t planning on using) and adjusted the tension. I forget which way I had to adjust, but it wasn’t on the default setting. Also, while I tested, I found out the ribbons slide a bit while I sew. I didn’t want to pin them (the whole visible hole issue), so I found I had to hold the ribbons fairly tight while sewing them–that’s probably why I had to make so many adjustments to the thread tension.
Take your time testing, because once you figure out what works to get a nice seam, the rest of the quilt is EASY.
Sewing
My pattern was a modified Courthouse Steps, so I was sewing straight line after straight line. It went very quickly. Every now and then I squared up my blocks, to make sure everything was the same size and would line up correctly. Once I had all nine blocks done, I sewed three together for a row, and then sewed all three rows together. Like an idiot, I put one row on upside down, so I had to rip the seam and sew it back again. Moral of the story: remember you’re dealing with printed fabrics and it does matter which way things face.
Backing and Binding
I wanted to back the quilt so I could type out my results and put them on the quilt as well. I used a thin batting and a heavy cotton material; in the future, I’d go with a heavy muslin and no batting. I did end up pinning the backing and batting in place so that it wouldn’t shift while I was sewing it down–I just made sure the pins went through the seams so the holes wouldn’t show on the front of the quilt. Instead of binding, I sewed right-sides-together and then turned the quilt inside (or rightside…whichever you like) out. I hand-sewed the opening. I like the look, but you might prefer to sew regularly and bind the quilt.
I am not quilting down the batting. Instead, I’m going to sew some tabs on the quilt to hang some of the rosettes. I figure the tabs will work in the same way “tying” a quilt works–they’ll be enough to keep the batting in place, but I won’t have to worry about quilting down the whole thing.
Lessons Learned
In some ways, I find quilting ribbons easier than regular fabric–or, at least, there’s less cutting involved. It takes a little more time to make sure everything is staying lined up and square, but otherwise it was straightforward.
The biggest problem was the thread tension–it could be great for a while, and then it would suddenly slip and the back of the seam would be loops and snags.
The needles also broke two or three times. However, keep in mind that I was using very thin needles–they weren’t made for sewing through something as heavy as ribbons. Changing needles is easy, and it was worth buying extra needles so that I’d have smaller holes along the seams.
My seam allowances were TINY–as close to the edge of the ribbon as I could get them. That’s hard to maintain, and takes concentration. But any bigger, and you start to lose printed material on the front.
Despite my best intentions, the ribbons aren’t always perfectly straight in the front. Sometimes the ribbons were crooked, and to get them in the quilt I had to turn the ribbon slightly for the straight seam. I’ve been debating whether it would be better to trim all the ribbons straight before starting, or if that would cause problems because some wouldn’t be as wide as others. My crookedness problem I was able to correct each time I squared up the blocks.
Metalic thread is evil. I had considered using it because it would match the print on the ribbons, but it was IMPOSSIBLE to work with. I could not get the thread tension right, and it would snag and pull every time. I’m just glad I figured that out before I got to the “to quilt the top or not” stage–it would have been a disaster if I’d tried top quilting with metalic thread.
Despite the problems, I really enjoyed making the quilt. It took about three days to make and looks fantastic hanging on the wall. I was worried it was going to be too “hard” or something, but, really, it was a straightforward job. The hardest part was setting the thread tension and then going slowly enough to keep everything straight–everything else was much the same as regular quilting.
Per Request: Books on Dressage
Riderone’s request for information about books on dressage comes at a good time, because I’ve been thinking about this topic lately. I actually don’t own any instructional horse books. I don’t know why I don’t, and lately I’ve been pondering the same question: what books to buy first?
Funny but true: the only instructional horse book I’ve ever owned was called Judging Hunt Seat Equitation or something like that, and it was given to me for Christmas when I was a teen. I promptly “lost” the book, because I was certain my mother and my trainer were plotting some devious scheme to make me actually judge a local schooling show (one the older teens put on every year for the young kids). It never occured to me that my trainer might have recommended the book simply because it was a good overview of what judges look for in equitation. Boy, talk about distrustful teens!
Anyway. Dressage books.
Fortunately, I have a solution for us both. I lurk (and sometimes post) on the Chronicle of the Horse bulletin board. In the dressage forum, someone else recently started a post called “If you could recommend ONE dressage book…“. The votes for books (and some of the comments as to why) are:
- Dressage in Harmony (Zettl)—5 votes
- Podhajsky—; 5 votes (not everyone gave a book title, but his name comes up several times)
- The Principles of Riding (Handbook from the German National Equestrian Federation)—3 votes
- Dressage with Kyra (or similar title, by Kyra Kirkland)—2 votes
- The Dressage Manual (by Benjt Ljundquist)—2 votes (“understandable”)
- Riding Logic (Museler)—2 votes (and one poster who thinks some of the examples are wrong)
- Horsemanship (Suenig)—2 votes (and another poster who likes the book but wouldn’t recommend it to a beginner)
- Basic Training of the Young Horse (Klimke)—1 vote
- Dressage: A study of the finer points of riding (Henry Wynmalen)—1 vote
- The USDF Book of Dressage—1 vote
- Dressage in Lightness (Sylvia Loch)—1 vote (“some very good descriptions of how a horse interprets the aids”)
- Common Sense Dressage (Sally O’Connor)—1 vote (recc’d for the exercises)
- Dressage Forumla (Erik Heberman)—1 vote (“great concepts to take down the road”)
- Real Life Dressage (Carl Hester)—1 vote
- Riding and Jumping
Personally, I lean towards Podhajsky and Zettle, as these are the names I see most frequently in “recommended reading” discussions (in addition to this thread).
(And if I somehow got the vote count wrong, forgive me. I’ve been known to count my fingers and get eleven, sometimes.)