29/10/2026
This resonated with me. I love my bit & bridle fitting but I also love my workshop time. Every time I make up a bridle, I am thinking of the horse it is going on. It takes time to handmake an item with love and I'm so grateful for my lovely customers who understand this. Thank you to you.
I was invited to their workshop and I went thinking I’d learn something about making bridles. I came home understanding how I’m supposed to be riding, which was not on the itinerary.
Nothing happens fast there. I should say that first.
There’s a table. Ekrama sits at it, and has for longer than I’ve been riding dressage. He picks up a strap of leather and doesn’t look at it. He runs it between his thumb and finger, slowly, the way you’d check a horse’s leg after work. If something is off, he knows. Nothing was measured. It’s all in the hands.
Then he puts it down and picks up the next one.
I kept waiting for the part where they’d explain it to me. There wasn’t one. Nobody says “this is the stitch that matters.” They just do the stitch, and then the next, and they do the underside, the part no rider will ever see against a horse’s face, with exactly the same attention as the top. I asked about that once. Ekrama looked at me as though I’d asked whether he also brushed his teeth on weekends.
The horse sees it, he said. Or someone said it for him. I’m not sure now. It had that quality.
Around four there was tea, because there is always tea, and we sat and talked about nothing, and nobody checked a phone. A bridle was waiting on the table when we got back. It looked finished to me. Ekrama picked it up, turned it over once, and set it aside.
Not yet.
I didn’t ask. I know that sentence. I’ve said it to myself on a horse who was beautiful in the corner and wrong in the middle, and I’ve ridden it anyway because the clock said so. They don’t ride it anyway.
I’d been treating the workshop as a place that makes a product, and the arena as a place where I make a performance, but they were never separate. It’s the same thing done by hand, slowly, with someone who cares what the horse feels: check the work with your hands, do the part nobody sees properly, and don’t call it ready because you’re tired of waiting.
I’d always thought that was a standard they held. It isn’t. It’s just how they work, and they’ve been friends of mine now for close to ten years without once mentioning it.
I came home and rode like someone was checking the underside. Nobody was. And that’s the point.
