Mr. Postman

Today the mail brought me something I have been waiting for for a long time now.  For a long time now, I have been admiring the model horse hobby from afar.  For anyone not familiar, here is a post explaining performance model horse showing (technically it's from She Moved to Texas, but I had an easier time finding the link to her guest post on Braymere Custom Saddlery). Basically model horses get dressed up in awesome scaled down versions of real life tack and do a still frame of real life horse events.  I'm slightly obsessed, and if anyone else is interested, I cannot recommend Braymere Custom Saddlery enough as a resource to learn a little more.  

However, I say admiring because I did not even own one Breyer. I say did because this arrived in the mail today! 

After a very long wait (as in, I first inquired about whether the set was still available back in August, and finally paid a few weeks ago), it's finally here!   One of the hobby blogs I follow is Stage Left Studios, with fabulous stablemate (1:32) scale tack by Grace Ledoux.  She made a portrait set of Secretariat's race tack, and I fell in love, but couldn't quite justify buying it when I had no horse to put it on.  Luckily for me, Grace threw in a horse with it, and I couldn't resist! 

There may or may not have been squealing when I saw how little it was.

I gathered my supplies

And then proceeded to squeal a little more about just how teeny tiny it was.

 Naturally, I had to tack up and play with it right away! It was a lot harder than I had thought it would be, but it was also 8000 times smaller and cuter than I'd expected! It's hard to get an exact scale in mind until you're physically holding something.  I spent maybe 45 minutes fiddling and fussing with wax and tweezers and tiny paper-thin straps before it was on and satisfactory for the time being.  Grace at one point had offered to permanently attach the tack for me, but I said no because I wanted to be able to play with it. I had a little teeeensy bit of regret over that decision when I spent about twenty minutes trying to get the wax on the undergirth to stay while also threading a 1:32 scale buckle for the overgirth and keep the saddle and pad in place.  I realized AFTER all of this fuss of course that the girth goes OVER the pad (duh, have I never tacked up a horse before?) so the wax would probably stick a lot better where it's actually supposed to go.  But for now, I'm not going to fuss with it, I'm just going to ooh and ahh and keep it as far as possible away from my very curious cat.

Mmm blobby bridle sticky wax (just behind the ear)

Overall, I am incredibly impressed with the set.  I am floored by how small it all is.  The leather straps are all literally paper thin and maybe as wide as a toothpick.  I'm particularly impressed with the reins and the blinker hood (surprisingly, my favourite parts are the ones I didn't spend forever fiddling with trying to get to stick).  I would buy from Stage Left again in a heartbeat.  (Say, anyone know where I could get a good simple custom paint job on a stablemate?  I might be able to be persuaded into commissioning a portrait tack set for a certain red pony that was once given as a gift to a certain someone at a certain time of year...)  If I had one and only one thing to say that wasn't absolutely gushing, it would be that I can't find the buckle hole on the overgirth, but a) this strap is the width of a toothpick, and b) it's clearly buckled in the sale photos, so I know it's on there, I just haven't found it yet.  Sometime soon i'll have to work up the nerve to untack and fix the sticky wax blobs and the girth.  I don't think I could possibly have bought a first model that would have made me any happier! Thank you Grace!