Just call me Gimpy

I meant to send a post before my surgery, letting everyone know that the posts to the blog might slow down a bit for the next few weeks. Unfortunately getting everything in order so that I could take six weeks off took more time than I expected.

But just so readers know, I went in for foot surgery this past Friday. The doctor shortened one of the bones inside my foot, reconstructed the damaged joint, and secured it all with screws. At the moment I am pretty much confined to the sofa, which is probably just as well since I am pretty heavily medicated. (The instructions on the prescription bottles say I should no operate heavy machinery, and Alan insists that includes Xacto blades.) Hopefully by the end of this week, I'll graduate to crutches and then a bit later just an orthopedic "boot".

Although posts to the blog will likely slow down, I had a number of older topics that I took pictures for but never got around to posting. I'm going to try to get some of those up in the next few weeks. These are older projects, so they might seem a bit out of order, but they have some useful information.

I will also be posting about the new editions from the studio for this year. I might be sidelined at the moment, there are a lot of exciting things planned for the near future.

Thistle auction

There are more pictures of the claybody custom Highland Pony mare, "Thistle", on the website now. (There is a second page of pictures that is linked to that page.) Her auction page is up on the Auction Barn here, though it doesn't go live until 8pm.

She'll be the last piece from the studio before I go on hiatus following my surgery, but I'll explain more about that in a later post.

Snow day!

We got our second snow in as many months. Three inches fell overnight, so it's still sitting undisturbed (aside from a few bunny tracks). In a few hours, it will be covered with sledding tracks and converted into snowmen. Like this guy from a few weeks ago:



There he is guarding my mailbox with his nerf sword. I thought the "angry eyebrows" were a nice touch. Of course, Emma would point out that he is facing the wrong way. Evil brown delivery trucks approach from the other direction.

But for now there is a view of pristine snow from the studio window (that's the window visible to the right in the first picture). It has been a good morning for working on the blog index, which is now up on the website.

Organizing it made me realize just how much information has accumulated here on the blog. I was also surprised to see just how often I posted about mold-making, since I don't consider that to be my real area of expertise. I am, truly, still learning that skill. But it is true that the best way to learn is to teach, so explaining the process has really helped me to better understand it myself. I was also surprised to see just how often horse color has creeped in, because I had decided early on that the blog would be about the studio, and not about my research. I guess the two things are more intertwined for me than I realized.

Hopefully with the index the information posted in the past will be more useful to others. I know it's going to help me remember what I have already talked about here, and what hasn't been covered and might be new and interesting. After more than three years, the real challenge is not to repeat myself too much!

As promised...

This time it's a shiny Highland Pony. This is "Thistle", a claybody custom sculpted by Sarah Minkiewicz and glazed here at Blackberry Lane.

She'll be headed to the Auction Barn late next week.

The fun part

I want to thank everyone who wrote over the last few weeks to encourage me to publish the horse color book in its entirety. I am still not sure how that will work from a logistics standpoint - publishing the book in two volumes seems to be the most likely route at the moment - but I have decided that it will contain everything that I know on the subject of breeds and their colors.

I also decided that I needed to make an effort to include more photographs. Even with the planned illustrations, there is just a lot of text. Walls of text. So I've been reaching out to people with photos of unusually colored horses with the hopes of including them. It feels a bit like a scavenger hunt, which has been fun. ("Got a true roan Shire? Check!")

The photo above is one recently added to my "have permission to use" list. It's a particularly striking example of silver dapple in the Highland Pony. My friend Caroline Jones took the shot and agreed to allow me to use it and several other pony pictures for the book. It makes me wish that the body of the book was being published in color, but even in black and white the color on that mare is hard to miss.



It's the color I keep envisioning on Sarah MB's Halflinger mare, maybe because it reminds me of the Miniature mare that Sarah, Joan and I visited during Mayhem one year.

I've also had Highland Ponies on my mind because I'm about to list (at long last!) the second of claybody customs that Sarah and I did, and this next one is a Highland Pony. She's a silver dapple dun gone grey, and like the mare above she's just full of dappley goodness. As soon as the Charlotte weather gives me something other than dreary overcast skies, I will post teaser photos.