Garden Gala Bracelet with blue bead mix and lobster clasp.

This Garden Gala bracelet with blue beads is heading across the country to a customer in California. I love to mix different shades of the same color.  And blue pops on any color horse hair. You can get a bracelet like this made with any color beads.

Garden Gala Bracelet with lobster clasp

Staying on this side of the country, this Garden Gala bracelet is heading right over the border to New Jersey to a returning customer. The classic look of a Garden Gala-style bracelet looks great on men or women.

You can order either of these styles from this site.

Also new, you can follow me on Facebook and Twitter! Find out what I’m working on and new products and classes coming your way.

A Renaissance band.

A cooper.

Irish dancers.

Belly dancers. Fencers. Sword swallowers. Lakota dancers. Ukrainian beaders. A flute maker…. the list goes on.

I ate samosa chaat and a kuhs lassi while me mom had a Native American Indian Taco.

And I got to give my favorite flintknapper and fly-rod-maker his new horse hair bracelet.

A medic ID bracelet with horse hair band.

It was all at Artifest, a cultural festival sponsored by the Museum of Indian Culture. You can experience it all again tomorrow (6/12)  at the festival, located at 2825 Fish Hatchery Road in Allentown.

Sent off this custom horse hair bracelet today to a customer in Ohio. The yellow beads look to me like bubbles floating around the wearer’s wrist. Maybe that’s because spring in the air, which means at my house a new box of sidewalk chalk and new bottles of bubbles for the kids.

Adding yellow beads to a black bracelet isn’t a color choice that would have occurred to me, but it turned out gorgeous.  That’s the beauty of creating custom orders: Customers have their own visions that I need to translate and that process, in turn inspires, me to think of new and different ways to create jewelry.

Contact me and we can create a custom piece of jewelry that inspires you!

]]> http://www.redtaildesigns.com/2011/05/02/yellow-bubbles/feed/ 2 http://www.redtaildesigns.com/2011/04/03/leap-year/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=leap-year http://www.redtaildesigns.com/2011/04/03/leap-year/#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2011 03:36:23 +0000 Susan http://www.redtaildesigns.com/?p=1342

Just shipped out these and 4 other custom pieces to a family in Florida who wanted to honor their horse. I love the way these Leap Year-style bracelet turned out. The white is the horse’s mane hair and the brown is the tail hair.

Have you ordered your horse hair jewelry for Christmas or Hanukkah gifts?

Remember, only a few more days to get your horse hair to me to make custom jewelry for that horse lover in your life or even you (you deserve it, right?).

Sneak out to the field and snip a bunch of hair from the underside of the tail as big around as your pinkie, put a rubberband on it and mail it to me at:

Susan Newquist
Red-Tail Designs, LLC
813 Porter St.
Easton, PA 18042

Get it to me by December 1, and I’ll send back a unique holiday gift in time for Christmas.

Keep in mind that all pieces ordered after Nov. 24 will incur a $20 per item rush fee.

Can’t sneak out to the field in the time? Give a gift certificate for any denomination!

Holiday.

Really? Already?

Personally I think all the holiday hoopla shouldn’t start until after Halloween. On Nov. 1 you can break out the Christmas carols and stores can heap upon us trees and sparkly ornaments and the like. But until Nov. 1, it’s still fall and pumpkins and trick or treat.

On the other hand, I think about holiday gift giving year-round. I’m always shopping for the perfect gift.

The perfect gift for the horse lover in your life is a custom horse hair bracelet! You send me the horse hair, I wash it and braid it, adding beads and sterling silver, even gold if you like. A piece of your favorite horse with you all the time.

Check the horse hair tab above to check out the different jewelry styles. If you’re not able to sneak into the field and clip a bit of horse tail, I offer gift certificates for purchase in any denomination. You can also order custom jewelry without sending me horse hair and I will use the tails I have in stock. Choose from white, black, brown or any combination of the three.

Creating this jewelry by hand takes time, so keep in mind these deadlines as you contemplate which horse hair jewelry piece to buy for a friend or put on your wish list.

• Horse hair must be in my hands for the order to be placed. Send your horse hair to me as soon as possible.
• I prefer to have horse hair before November 24 for custom pieces.
• Any horse hair arriving after November 24 will incur a $20 per piece rush fee for Christmas delivery.
• All horse hair must be to me by December 1 to be made into jewelry for Christmas delivery.
• Gift certificates are available any time and do not expire.

Please fill out the custom horse hair jewelry order form and mail it along with your check or money order to:

Susan Newquist

Red-Tail Designs, LLC
813 Porter St.
Easton, PA 18042

If you choose to pay with PayPal, I will invoice you when I receive your order.

Happy Halloween/Happy Thanksgiving/Merry Christmas!

30 horse lovers + beads + cones = lots of horse hair tassels.

Tuesday night I introduced the Timbertalk Trotters to the art of horse hair tassels. This Montgomery County 4-H horse club has members from 8 to 19 years old and all of them had a blast making tassles. Even the moms joined in.

Some people brought their own horse hair and a few donated mane hair, which makes soft, fluffy tassels. I set them loose on a box of beads and the kids turned ordinary tassels into one-of-a-kind pieces of personal art.

Three of the members of this 4-H group are proud owners of Red-Tail Designs Horse Hair Jewelry. One just received her horse hair bracelet with name plate in June as a high school graduation gift from her mom.

My budding horse lover came along to help me teach and to get a glimpse of 4-H. She begged me the whole way home to join. I see 4-H meetings in my future.

If your 4-H club, Girl Scout troop, Boy Scout troop or other group would like to learn horse hair tassel making, contact me.

Even the moms were in on the action of making tassels.

A pair of horse hair earrings made by a participant in last week's Horse Hair Jewelry Class at My Father's Beads. See what she's been up to since the class at www.whosgotyourgoat.blogspot.com

If you missed the Horse Hair Jewelry Class last Sunday, you have another chance!

Swine flu claimed some of class, so I rescheduled another class for Thursday, November 19 from 2:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. The class  will be at My Father’s Beads in Coopersburg, PA. You can register online or call the store at 610-282-6939. Time to make start making  gifts for Christmas!

Braided horse hair tied into a rope halter with fiador knot and lead rope.

Setting the knots was the tough part.

So it really wasn’t a mummy.

The white horse was a model for my latest venture into custom pieces I never dreamed of: a replica rope halter made from horse hair.

Really, folks, I’m as impressed with rope halter as I am with the horse head.

But this tale has a sad beginning. The rope halter is made from the tail of a horse named Matador. He died recently of colic. He was a beauty. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I shed a few tears when I got his tail in the mail. A small reminder of my loss of Saint in April (horse…dog, it’s a loss no matter how small or tall the friend).

A fiador is a round knot under the chin, which makes a loop where the trainer can clip on the lead rope.

Learning how to tie a rope halter with fiador was the first task. Not as hard as I suspected. Next, I had to shrink all the measurements to make it a smaller size. Again, not as hard as I suspected.

Then it was making the rope from Matador’s tail: all 7 feet of rope. Matador had an impressively long tail, but I still had to make 16 pulls to weave them all into a 4 strand braid.

Seven feet of braided horse hair.

Now came the hard part: tying the rope halter with the horse hair. Horse hair is flexible, but stiff. It will take the shape of anything, but sometimes it has to be forced into that position and held there for quite a while.

All of the knots wanted to come undone when I tied them, so I had to set them by weighting the halter. With the fiador tied, I hung it from a lamp with a horse bit (how appropriate) and a candle in a cup that looks like a cappuccino (thank you Secret Santa ’07) . No rhyme or reason here, just heavy stuff that was available.

A few days of hanging set the fiador knot and I tied the rest of the halter. While that was hanging to set the knots, I moved onto the horse head.

If you look closely, you can see the horse's eye.

The rope halter looked like a jumble of knots without something to give it shape, so I conceived making the horse head out of what was, again, handy…newsprint, freezer tape and glue. The muse of the horse head guided my hand through a box of glue to Elmer’s wood glue. It gave the paper a hard exterior almost like paper mache. Elmer’s regular glue made it a bit soggy.

So now the horse head and halter are headed across the country to California. In a few days a man will be opening a box and remembering his faithful companion.