Horse Barding
(May 2018)
Introduction
A few years ago, when Mistress Eleanor fitzPatrick was a Champion of Horse, she kindly offered to let me ride her horse Medallion in the Equestrian Champs event at EK 50 year. She was hosting, and couldn't ride him herself, and she is always amazingly generous with her horses. I of course jumped at the chance. She suggested I might want to make my own barding to ride in, and I agreed. Conveniently, she even has write-ups on how to make things related to equestrian, so I just needed to decide what I wanted to make.
Inspiration
I started out by going through pinterest, as you do. Eventually, I stumbled across an image from the Manesse Codex. It was simple, and in my heraldic colors. It seemed like just the thing I wanted to make. Since I sadly don't own my own horse, and rely on the kindness of friends to compete, it means I can end up on a tiny pony, or a very large horse. I wanted to make something that could reasonably fit a wide range of sizes. A dagged saddle cloth seemed like a good choice (to be fair, it would be a ground length dagged blanket on a pony, but close enough).
Construction
As previously mentioned, Mistress Eleanor had write ups. For this, I used this one specifically: https://wiki.eastkingdom.org/index.php?title=Dagged_Saddle_Cloths The link very conveniently provided measurements to follow, and gave some really helpful advice about sewing the dags before cutting them.
As mentioned, I wanted to base this off of the image from the Manesse Codex. I purchased ~3 yards of heavy weight gold linen, and the same in red linen. I chose heavy weight since I thought it would stand up to more abuse, though since EK50 was an obscenely hot event, I wish I had maybe gone with medium instead. Since the fabric was significantly wider than what I needed, I cut the fabric to width, and then had some long strips to do with as I wanted. The cloth in the image seemed to have a red border, so I cut out some long narrow strips of fabric, ironed the edges under to make essentially on grain bias tape, and then used my sewing machine to stitch down the red borders as shown. This is a saddle cloth for a horse... as such, I really didn't want to spend countless hours hand sewing everything, and figured having visible machine stitching would be juuuuust fine.
From there, I sandwiched the red and gold linen together, with the decorative borders on the inside, and sewed around the edges of the dags, leaving a piece of one of the long sides open so I could turn the whole thing inside out later. Once everything was sewn, I cut the dags. From here, it could be turned inside out, have the turning hole stitched up, and ironed flat. It was finally starting to look like something!
Next came the fancy applique bits. I probably should have done this part before attaching the red lining, but hindsite. I used an iron on fusible interfacing for this. It was something I had never used before. The image I was basing this cloth on had dots on the rear end, but not much else decoration wise. I wanted to personalize it a bit, so I thought I would add arrows to the dags. I cut out all the dots and arrows after fusing the interfacing to the fabric. I then ironed them onto the cloth where they needed to go, and dragged out my modern sewing machine to try and applique them all down. Once again, that was something I had never done before. It... is not easy, and some of the appliques look pretty wonky, but if you are watching me on a horse, you can't tell.
The last step was to make a hole for the girth to go through. I had intentionally aligned the middle horizontal red stripe to be where this hole should go. So, I cut through the stripe, and then just bound the slit with some more of my on grain bias tape.
Final Thoughts
EK50 ended up being ridiculously warm, and I spent half the competition when I wasn't on just trying to keep the very dark horse cool and out of the sun, with the saddle cloth folded over the saddle as much as possible. I thought it looked great on him, though it possibly could have been a little less wide to fit him better. After the very sweaty event, the cloth needed a good washing. This proved that my machine applique skills were indeed lacking, so I had to retouch a few things. I have since gotten to use the saddle cloth again, this time on Tesoro (also owned by Mistress Eleanor). And somehow I won that event and became Queen's champ.
