Your Turn: Outfitting your clotheshorse

Are you the proud owner of a clotheshorse? Megan Rust gives us a peek inside her horses’ closet, er, tack room and shares some tips for keeping all that wardrobe organized.

From Megan:

When I was younger, I was a “clotheshorse”–slang for what is now called a “fashionista”–but once I got back into horses as an adult I discovered that all I could wear were the grubby barn clothes suited for cleaning stalls and feeding the three horses and two donkeys for whom I had become “the human.” Only when I went to a clinic or a show could I exercise my taste for fashion-forward clothes. So to enjoy my taste for clothes I began to look for the newest in horsewear. I was no longer a clotheshorse, I OWNED clotheshorses.

As you may know, a grey mare is the horse world’s fashionista, and I have two of them. Also in my barn is a black-bay mare, a close second to the greys in fashionista status. All three of them look good in so many colors, and are “winters” in the color season palette, as am I. We match each other in the colors we wear well: bold brights and black/white/grey.

George Morris is known for insisting on white only for saddle pads, but I have a wall rack in my tack room that holds more than two dozen saddle pads in different colors, from bright orange to purple leopard.

Here is my Lusitano filly, Athene, when she was being started, wearing a hot pink leopard pad:

This is a photo of Pico, my miniature donkey Mocha’s mule colt, wearing a red saddle pad. I had used the pad to get Athene comfortable wearing a blanket when she was still a filly, and she is sniffing the pad here to check it out. I put the pad on the colt to show her it was okay, then put the pad on her to familiarize her with something on her back. Next we graduated to a blanket, which she wore well. Easy, peasy.

I got many of my colored pads from Fashion Horse. Here’s one of their pads that is especially great on a grey, elegant enough for a clinic or schooling show.

I had a lot fun designing my tack room to hold all of my saddle pads and coolers and polo wraps. The grids on the walls came from The Organized Barn and Trailer.

Part of my saddle pad rack is shown here, along with the baskets and bins on grids which hold other items, including saddles and bridles. All of the racks for the tack came from The Organized Barn.

This is the other side of the saddle pad rack, and the adjoining wall which holds medical supplies, coolers, even pillow wraps and standing wraps.

\

The saddle pad rack is 10′ long, and is made of two racks you can get from Schneider’s.

A collection of saddle pads must be paired with a collection of blankets and coolers and quarter sheets. This is a shot of two of my girls, wearing colorful blankets in a snow shower. The purple plaid blanket is from Weatherbeeta, and the orange/rust/cream plaid is from Pessoa. The grey is Juno, and she loves getting dressed up in her bright blankets, though her ears do not show that in this photo. Apparently, she is annoyed by the new snow, unusual for our part of the country. She thought she had left the snow behind her in Canada when I bought her in 2003. Havannah, the black-bay, is much happier in her Pessoa.

Go Riding in Style!

Is it “Your Turn”? We want to hear your stories. View our contributor guidelines here.