Horses wear bridles. Bridles have a part called browband on horse’s forehead. It is connected to the part that goes to horse’s neck, crown. The purpose of the browband is mainly to keep the crown on its proper place. It has another, equally important function. They are worn a bit like jewelry. You see, bridles look all almost identical. The browband brings that little something to an ordinary bridle. It can be a simple leather band or shiny piece of design. A horse can have several different browbands for different occasions and purposes.
I’ve made this and that with beads, but leatherwork is not that familiar to me. I got help from a harness maker who also makes some browbands. She has very little experience in beading so we were happy to make an effort together. She made a browband, I added the beads. The work she made was so meticulous that I can’t help but to admire that precision. The space was made for 5 mm tila beads and it was exactly that! She also got an idea how to make it easy to attach to the bridle and easy to remove.
There are typically two colors of bridles: black and brown. I dare to say that most of the bridles are black. In this case I had a bead mix that consisted of blue and green beads. Blue ones go well together with black leather, green ones with brown leather. We decided that black is a safer choice. It’s more common and the age shows less in black leather. Brown has more color variation from cognac to chocolate, and the color may change over time.
Only new tool I needed was an awl, the rest I found at home. The original idea (see picture below) was to make a dense row of beads. Nice idea that didn’t work in real life. The browband is supposed to look good both flat and bent. Eventually I sew each one on its place. In addition to the awl, I used Fireline fishingline (0,8 mm, color smoke), two needles and a pair of pliers. The needles were a beading needle and an ordinary steel needle. The beading needle was thin enough to go through the beads and the steel needle was tough enough to go through the leather, with a little help from its friend the awl. Sometimes I pulled out the needle through the leather with the pliers.
If horses are your thing, you may like to see my horse blog (only in Finnish).
