These two bracelets were made from the hair from only one horse – a paint horse, with two different colors in the tail hair. Paint horses are treasured for their white and other color of pinto markings but I treasure them due to the wonderful variety of color possible from only one horse! The bracelets really highlight the character of this horse.
Recent Work
A Great Idea
Someone wanted their custom braided horsehair bracelets to have special safety chains, so I designed this and made the bracelets for them. I think they turned out great, and I know the owner loved the way these came out. As you can see there were three different horses that have hair in these bracelets, a special memento.
Two Friends Celebrated
This bracelet was braided from the hair of two horses who are very good friends. In fact, they get along so well together, they don’t even fight over food but peacefully eat from the same bucket! The owner wanted to celebrate this friendship by having the hair of both horses braided together.
If you look closely at this beautiful hair, it almost looks like there are four horses in this, instead of only two, but this slight color change is caused by the hair that was in the brush of the tail and exposed to sunlight, and the hair that was up close to the dock of the tail.
Repairing a Watch with Horsehair
I got a watch in for repair. The lady wanted it to have braided horsehair sides, instead of the chain sides it had come with. The chain kept breaking, and just wasn’t working. She wanted the horsehair to look like a herringbone pattern. This is how the watch looked when I first got it:
I like it much better now, and so does she.
The Hoof Pick Story
By age 20 I was working at a lot of horse barns and an annoying thing kept happening to me. Older and more senior horsemen would spot my hoof pick and claim it was theirs, because they had lost theirs and assumed that I’d found it and picked it up. I would buy another one, and the same thing would happen.
Finally I took some baling twine and covered my hoof pick with braided baling twine. Since no one else could braid, no one could possibly claim it was theirs. That’s why I still have that hoof pick to this day.
That’s right: when I first started to braid, I used baling twine. It was both affordable and available.