Done moving, still unpacking

 So we finally moved two weeks ago but it wasn't until this weekend that I finally had the office set up enough to reopen the etsy shop. There are still a few boxes but overall we've reached the finish line. 

The highlight of the move has to be stove snake. We were just starting to move boxes in and noticed a snake... on top of our stove. Anthony tried to grab him but the snake wriggled away and went into the stovetop. We tore our entire new stove apart looking for the snake. Nothing. Two days later moving some boxes and he was just chilling on the counter. He was safely relocated to the front yard. 

Otherwise, I finished making a bunch of sets in lots of fun colors and those have finally made it to the etsy. (In case anyone is doing some birthday or early Christmas shopping for a model horse person 😉).

But also on the topic of christmas! Everyone get your online shopping done early this year! USPS is saying it will be as bad if not worse than last year's busy shipping season!

I've also got some new items in the shop.

Mounting blocks

And 1:9 scale coolers!

I had a lot of fun making these!

Tinkercad: A beginner CAD tutorial

 So Fusion 360 has moved to require a subscription. Which I'm fine with, but for folks wanting to get into CAD designing without shelling out for that, I've got another solution, https://www.tinkercad.com/ . It's free and requires no downloads! This is a tutorial for designing a feed pan, much like the last tutorial just because they are a quick and easy way to start.

I started out my CAD designing here and a lot of complex designs were made with this program (jumps, saddle stands, etc.)

Here you have a set of basic shapes to make your design out of. For this tutorial we're going to start with the cone.

To start just place a cone on the build surface, then when you click on it you can change the dimensions.

For a traditional sized pan well start with a base of 26 mm by 26 mm.

Then we'll adjust the height to 10 mm. The red square is how you adjust the height and the arrow on top is how you would raise and lower the shape. The two headed arrows are for rotating. 

To make it a bucket shape look in the top right menu. Where it says top radius set it to 14. That will widen the top of the cone and leave you with a feed pan like shape.

Next in the top left corner you have symbols (copy, paste, duplicate, delete). Copy the shape we've just made.

Grab the arrow at the top and pull one shape up 3 mm to get an offset.

Next in the right menu choose hole for the upper shape.

Drag your mouse over both shapes. In the top right corner chose the group symbol. That will cause the hole to cut out the interior of the shape. 

Tada you have a feed pan!

Tinkercad is a bit odd for a CAD program but it is also very intuitive which makes it a really good starting place.

Back to vacation mode/ All orders will go out on time

Welp life threw a curve ball during breyerfest. Landlord is selling the place we rent and we've got to move. So now we're scrambling to find a house in austin, tx... one of the craziest markets in the country. I will get all my current orders out within processing time but I have to re-close so we can focus on find a place to live. I'll update the blog when it reopens...

The Witte Museum

 Over the 4th we decided to take a short trip down to San Antonio which is one of my favorite places to visit. We go a few times a year to enjoy the river walk. This time the weather was poor so we explored somewhere new! The Witte museum is part natural history, part native history, and part cowboy/ cowgirl history. We went through exabits on various dinosaur bones and fossil found in Texas (T-rexes were one of them in case you happen to be thinking of time traveling... lol). There were also maps of Texas throughout the prehistoric periods showing that it spent a lot of time under water and as part of a massive coastline which explains why they find so many fossils. 

But of course the best part of the museum involved horses!

I loved this museum display, the attention to detail was superb. I'm sure this would be a pretty strong setup on the live show table too!

Then we moved on to old west tack. Sorry for the glare from the glass. 

I really liked the use of color on this particular saddle.

And here we have a nice sidesaddle!

I also go some photos of the wagon of course!

As well as the information placard.

I really enjoyed the museum, if you are near San Antonio definitely go, we spent over 4 hrs there! Also if anyone want to use these as reference pics, I don't mind. 

Vacation Mode and Breyerfest

 All,

The shop will be on vacation as of today. We will reopen on  July 14th and kick things off with our Breyerfest sale (25% storewide) + free gift in all orders!

I've been contemplating whether or not to take a brief hiatus prior to breyerfest. Last year I did a big sale and it was amazing so this year I want to knock it out of the park. That means I need a bit of time to prioritize making a bunch of stuff. I'll be updating this blog and my instagram (handcraftedbykari_studios) with pics of all the new stuff. Hopefully there will be a lot.

I'm putting together sets like I used to have for a while, so far I have a bunch of haybags and I'm working hard to get the buckets finished up and halters + leads made!

I've also redone my tackmaking storage. Since I don't make a lot of tack I only get small sheets of leather from rio rondo on occasion so I switched from this super messy drawer thing.

To this much more organized toolbox. Plus it is easier to store and bring with me (in case I want to make tack in front of the TV or something). Can you believe it was only $11 on amazon! (SCORE!)

Rainbows

 I got some rainbow filament! I've been wanting some for a while and I finally convinced myself to get some... (I'm really good at convincing myself to get things lol!) One of the issues is that it takes a lot of filament to get a good expression of the color change... so it's going to take some experimentation. I printed out a jump stand to get an idea of how fast it changes and wow did it turn out better than expected. 

I was worried the shift would be too abrupt between the colors so it's nice that it's a long gradient of shift. One of the ways to get a even better shift is to do a bigger print. So instead of 2 jump stands, next time I might try 4 to get it more pronounced, the only downside being that it will take 22hrs to complete such a big print...

I'm trying to see if I'd be able to do buckets or feed pans but I've got to load the build plate up a lot to do so which is always a risk, if one piece comes unstuck it all has to go. 

In other news, I've been in a jump making mood recently. I finally go around to making a schleich scale version of my most popular jump. A classic scale version is in the works as well.

Why did they have to make the heads bigger?

 I guess all my dolls are old and now all of the new breyer dolls have the biggest heads.

 I made this really cool helmet for my dolls.

 But here we are, I don't make helmets to fit the new heads. I don't own dolls of the new heads. And now I have a really cool infographic since saying it won't fit the new dolls is not clear enough. But seriously why did they have to do a weird hybrid thing?