Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

Inspired by Susanna's comment on the last post on card horses - she'd bought the stuff but not actually made one yet - I give you the five minute peg horse. I have a fantasy world I inhabit from time to time where I waft about making stuff, without it going disastrously wrong; a dog running off with something or me getting bored. Getting over all of those problems, here is the ultimate in re-useable creativity. I may have more. The tea towels may not escape.

these ones are cardboard . Thanks to Val for this.

Why would the younger person have to be fond of children? Were they supposed to act as child-catcher for a skewbald who liked to eat them? From Riding, July-August, 1948

always providing you're not buying a book, of course.

Look! Here! This is a yarn bomb - here is the deed in progress . (And any time Dilly Tante wants to yarn bomb my  hen house, she is welcome). Through the graveyard, over the electric fence. No problem.

Here is my dog, styled as a dog. A spoiled dog, who is allowed on the sofa, but a dog. Here is a dog which is well, not .

Joan Lamburn's The Mushroom Pony is one of those truly bonkers stories. It's about a foal whose mother has eaten a magic mushroom (yes, really), and as a result the foal can fly. The book was published in the 1940s, so I guess that magic mushroom didn't have quite the connotation that it does now - or perhaps it did, to a select few, and Joan Lambourn was incredibly subversive.  It is impossible for me, at any rate, to read the book without having the alternative meanings hovering about, particularly when I read the dedication: To Alyse... and Harry... Who know how Magic Mushrooms grow Which makes me want to rush out and find them and ask what exactly their familiarity with mind altering substances was. The book is about Pansy, a mare who eats a magic mushroom.  She then has a foal (Joan, whilst subversive, holds to 1940s views on the process of mating: it is simply not mentioned. Pansy has three foals, but there is no mention of any stallion. I did wonder if the ...

this pony will do instead. Unless the Apocalypse intervenes, of course. Thanks to boing-boing for the first, and Susanna Forrest for the second. And apologies for repeating myself if you follow me on Twitter.

Thanks to Chronicle of the Horse for this.

I was going to post about a DIY My Little Pony program I found, because I was quite proud of librarian pony, but then via Troton TV on Twitter came the glorious news that the bling heavy primping that infests the beauty pageant scene has now spread to ponies.   At the Calgary Stampede, no less, which I'd always thought was quite tough and rodeo-ish.   Pics and story here .  Eyeliner.  Eye shadow.  Sparkly hair gel. They shave their muzzles, for goodness' sake.  Horses have hairs there because they need them. If primping is what floats your boat, then why not stick to My Little Pony , who frankly won't really care if you daub it with eyeshadow?

The filly-in-the hat I blogged about a couple of days ago is a real life racehorse.  I had wondered if she was photoshopped but due to not reading Horse and Hound closely enough last month I entirely missed the fact that Ambers is a 2 year old filly owned by Fox's Biscuits, and she is going to star in an advertising campaign for their biscuits later on this year.  In fact, she might be starring in it already .   I must a. pay more attention to Horse and Hound and not just read the horses for sale ads at the back and daydream and b. not switch off brain when the tv advertisements come on. I had quite hoped there would be something about milliner Stephen Jones' foray into equestrian design on his website, but alas no, possibly in my opinion as a keen observer of fashion because Amber's hat doesn't fit into his Spring/Summer 2011 theme, which is  drifting and dreaming .  Definitely has the colour block thing covered though - the hat is the sort of technicolou...

Well why not ?

an Eco Pony .

I was in Birmingham last weekend, sitting in a garden, when I heard a terrible wailing from the street outside.  The people I was with were vaguely irritated, but not at all alarmed.  They saw my puzzled face, and explained the noise was the trumpet the rag and bone man blew.  He was a regular, and not a popular, visitor.  He had a van, not a horse.  Maybe that was where he was going wrong. There was recent article in the Daily Express which extolled the benefits of the resurgent rag and bone man with horse; the horse apparently encouraging people to recycle  in France.  Maybe someone should give Mr Birmingham Rag-and-Bone a copy of the article.  Charm might be the way to go. Thanks to Rosemary Hall for telling me about this.

There are whole fields of equine weirdness Lady Gaga has not yet plumbed, but she's on the way .

I should have read the email telling me about this with more care.  When I went to to the recommended page and read about the horse head fiddle in the local history collection at Moyses Hall, Suffolk, I thought at first it was called that because of a similarity in shape:  wrong.  It's called a horse head fiddle because it is made out of a horse's skull.  Apparently it sounds as bad as it looks.   Scroll down (right to the end) to see it in all its glory .  Alas the picture doesn't enlarge. Many thanks to Rosemary Hall for telling me about this.

This  is what I thought I was going to get in the initial horse head fiddle investigation.  The morin khuur is a traditional Mongolian instrument with two strings.   One string was made with hairs from a stallion's tail, and the other with hairs from a mare's.  The bow was strung with horse hair, and the sound box was wood.  I found a couple of legends on Wikipedia about the instrument's genesis :  both have the instrument being created out of the bones of equine tragedy.  In one a beloved winged horse is killed when a jealous woman cuts off the horse's wings so it crashes to the ground and dies.  The rider made a fiddle from the remains, and used the fiddle to mourn the horse.   Another legend has a wicked lord killing a boy's beloved white horse.  The horse's spirit instructs the boy to make an instrument from its bones and hair. With its possible equine genesis, use by a people reliant on the horse and construction out of horse, I w...

Frankly I prefer Lady Gaga's efforts to these mere pretenders . Thank you to Susanna Forrest, Karen Krizanovich and Twitter for that.

No, really. If you don't fancy just any old rocking horse, you can now get one in the form of Lucinda Frederick's Headley Britannia . That'll show them in the nursery.

It took me a while to work out what's going on here, but I've got it now.