Hobby Horse Party Favors

My daughter Claire turned one in March, and since then, every friend or colleague who has seen the photos has asked me how I made the hobby horses that each of the kids received.  To start, I want to disclaim that only 3 children of hobby-horse-age even attended the party, and one of the three was Claire, so I didn't exactly have a slew to make.  Nonetheless, make them I did!

Originally, I had hoped to save some of my precious time buying horses from an etsy vendor.  And while there are so many cute ones to choose, from, none were in my price point.  If I WAS going to buy from etsy though, I'd buy one of these arabian versions, my goodness they are pretty!

Fortunately eHow came to the rescue with a series of wonderfully helpful tutorial videos.  I won't repeat the instructions here because the videos do a much better job.  But I did make a few adjustments that are worth noting:

(1) Rather than sew plush ears, I included the ear in my silhouette pattern of the horse head.  Does this make the horse look like a unicorn without ears?  Arguably.  But these are 1 and 2 year olds, I didn't think they would notice.

(2) I sewed buttons on for eyes.  In fact, all of my materials were things I had lying around, including the fabric leftover from other projects. 

(3) I added bridals to my horses.  They are not really horse-accurate in their design, but as an equestrian myself, I knew my horses needed some tack.

(4) To attach the horses to the sticks, I staple gunned the "neck" fabric to a wide wooden dowel, and then gathered with thread and covered my tracks with ribbon.  This held up very sturdily for me and looked cute.

(5) Blue ribbons- what horse show would be complete without them?!  Mine weren't blue, but they worked well- they were made by accordion folding 2 inch wide strips of paper, gluing them end to end, flattening the circle, and then adding a paper disk to the center.  I then cut paper tails and used sticker letters to apply each child's initial.  I used safety pins to attach the ribbons to the horses and denote which horse belonged to which child.  This was a small touch that was noticed by adults only.  And that's just fine with me.

My favorite part of making these ponies was making the manes.  Who knew stuffed critters could be so doable?  This is probably not a project for a beginning crafter, but it wasn't as hard as I expected.  Go forth and make ponies, see for yourself!