Sidesaddle

 

I have sold my beautiful sidesaddle on Ebay.

 

Tarq and getting up in the morning

Is not always happening! I have a lot of pictures of the Tarq and me trying to get him up!

Sometimes I just give up. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em!

Scent of the day

Today I am wearing Encre Noir, by Lalique.

Green, green, greener than green, vetiver with a darkness lurking behind. It’s marketed for men but who cares? It goes very well with Eau de Cheval.

Dressage with an Arab horse

Is hopeless!

Here you see what happened when I came to visit my horse with wild plans of doing some serious training.

This horse is not awake!

And he never got any more awake…

He was still sleeping when  I left!!!!

A really huge daunting project

I am preparing for my ”Ladies sidesaddle weekend” another fun weekend with my friends and this time we are going to be taught in sidesaddle riding. And when we are not having lessons we hope the weather will be good enough for our usual sport of dashing at mad-speeds through the forest!!!

But if the freezing weather holds, (and it’s next weekend!) we will have to resign and behave as ladies all the time instead of half the time as we planned….

Anyway, there’s going to be no fun for me if I can’t get my trailer fixed. I have a great trailer, I brought it with my savings many years ago and it was allready old then. In the years it is mine I have repainted it, replaced the pulling thingy, made a new floor, and replaced the axels, and now the walls have become so rotten that if I don’t replace them is ”Adios trailer”!

My trailer

The holes in the walls:

.

In the summer all kinds of interesting musrooms and toadstools grow on the rotten wood…

I painted the rotten parts whitish to make them less noticeble from a distance. But some parts you can stick your finger through!!!

But this is a really huge job! Not just the job, but the taking apart of the trailer! The fiberglass hood is attached in a very bizarre and complicated manner and it took us quit a while to find out how. Also there are so many Screws and bolts to take off, and they are all rusted and rotten and fixed together with all the rust. Also they tend to swivel around because most of the wood is rotten!

The screws and bolts, which ones belong where and how many we need

I was not really sure I could ever do it, so i was thrilled when my friend J offered me to stay the weekend and I could use her barn and she would help me take the thing apart and rebuilt it!

My hands hurt with the cuts and abrasions, and my back aches, but at last! late at night we figured out how to get the hood off! Without J’s help I would never have managed to get this far! (Which isn’t far at all)
Here you see J cutting through one of the bolts we couldn’t get out so we have to destroy it to remove it.

The attachment of the hood, There must be a weld between the folded strip and the U-profile on the inside. Here you can see it after we bend it to open, so we could loosen the fiberglass hood. If the fiberglass cracks I can throw the remains on my trailer on the dump!!! It’s a stupid construction: it holds a lot of water. I was hell to drill out the 45 special bolts!!! J did most of them!

So tomorrow we will remove the hood very carefully, and store it in a safe place. Then we will try to see how to remuve the metal strips and get the wooden panels out. Hopefully in one piece so we can use them as a template to cut the new oned. I brought the special plates yesterday. We need to do two big walls, to small ones, and one narrow strip in the front. We plan to do one piece at a time so as not to make the whole thing fall apart.
We think that putting the trailer back together might actually be a lot less work as taking it apart! We still aren’t quite sure if we will succeed.
In case the suspence is killing you, I will continue the Saga of the Trailer tomorrow!

Sad

It was a shock for me today to read about my blogging friend’s husbands death by leukemia.

So this painting is for Carol, it’s called ”Waiting at dawn”

Riding in the snow

Today was a day of such beauty, it was magical! Beautiful! Everything was white, with the sun going down there were beautiful colours everywhere, and there was a snow-mist softening the landscape!
Al Tarq was happy to be out. Not much to amuse him at the moment.
It very cold of course. For tips on dressing and drawings of what to wear, and a drawing of an angry, fluffy Tarq, see my art-blog!

This is how I look when fully dressed for winterriding:

Sundown behind the trees

The world looked a very mysterious place

Zora in the snow. She walks fine in the snow, actually has less trouble with her elbow.

Within half an hour all our hairs were covered in a thin layer of ice.

Tarq wanted to go ludicrousspeed here, and although I loved a fine trot, I did think ludicrousspeed was a bit too dangerous. The icy slippery frozen remnants of the last snow period are still hidden under the fresh snow.

Zora’s hairs are also covered in ice!

Back at the village

The Equerience

That’s the name of the big horse and coach expo I went to with The ”Istituto d’Arte Equestre”. The classical dressage institute from Maestro Giorgio Mereu Pez who is my riding instructor. The whole weekend was a good time. I had some paintings, to cheer up the stand, and made drawings, and finished a painting of the maestro himself.

I sold quite a few of my diary paintings, and got some commissions, but unfortunately I invested the proceeds in a very good Champion and Wilton side-saddle….

I’ve got a bit of a writer’s block, besides being very busy, with painting, cleaning, horse and saddles, (I’ve brought the Champion and Wilton side-saddle remember!!!)
Everything’s going swell, and I will be with the Q again soon. And will be stuck in America with lots of time to write 😉

This is a drawing I did last weekend, sorry for the bad quality, I had to photograph it and it was dark, all my photos of the weekend are bad 😦

Today, yesterday and the day before

I made these paintings.

Read all about them on my Art blog!

Drawing at the horse fair

Yesterday morning I went to the village of Zuidlaaren. Every year, people from all over Europe flock to Zuidlaaren to sell and buy horses.
When you go you should go very early in the morning, Before 07.00. And it is usually very cold so you should get all your winterstuff out and wear it in layers! I bring a fresh sketchbook and a couple of soft pencils (The soft pencils get a lot harder in the cold)
The sketches I made will be posted at my Art Blog.

When I arrived (before 07.00) it was still dark

Check out the murderous candy! There is a fair attached to the horse fair and many people spend the whole night there, going on the rides and doing the rounds of the café’s. I always preferred to sleep early and be comparatively fresh when setting out for a hard days work.

Now there are a lot of really ugly, badly built horses. And horses which aren’t quite healthy, But then they are one of the reasons I like to sketch at the fair. And every year I fall for one of these horses! If I had some money I might actually take one home!

So… Wanna see ”The Artist at Work?”
Go to my Art Blog where I also post videos of ”The Artist at Work”

The black Frisians are always hugely popular. But the breeding lately seems to aim at a very slender narrow horse. I don’t like it at all; I like the more compact broadly build Frisian. They always carry their head very proudly.

Norwegian Fjord Horses. Very popular in the Netherlands for those who are not all out to ride competitions, but prefert o ramble around nature.

After being put there since night not all horses are resigned tobeing tied down.

There are big horses and small horses.

Drawing a draughthorse

The village is absolutely Packed with humans and horses. It’s a miracle no accidents happen.

A couple of Belgian heavy draughthorses.

Warmblood ridinghorses, all very young still, basically foals.