How to Design your Western Saddle?

When you invest in buying a saddle, you give in a good amount of time researching and making decisions. Furthermore, you work on processing the task of how it looks and what will be the best design pattern. However, along with some pro tips, you may also require to learn how to design your western saddle.

How to start with the Designing of Saddle?

As we know that there can be different colors and tooling options to design your saddle, you may be thinking about where to start. Though it may sound lengthy, the process is fun, and you’ll love it when it’s complete. Also, if you are really into horse riding, then customizing and designing the saddle by yourself is a better task for your horse.

Here are the steps that you can follow to design a western saddle –

Choose the main color for your saddle:

It is the base that attracts the main focus of people. Thus, choosing the right color for your leather will add extra points as it complements the horse. Mark the following points as well –

• Keep the saddle color in accordance with the color of bridles and breast color.
• The color of the horse and how well it will showcase the saddle’s color.
• You want to go with the kind of leather (smooth or rough-out) for your saddle.
• Are you going to choose a traditional or modern style of saddle design?

There are a few pointers that you need to make at the beginning. Remember that a complete proof outlook on how to design a western saddle will be more promising for the next steps.

Thus, always be sure that you do not get into any trouble in between while processing the design of the saddle.

The color choices you can make will depend on your taste and preferences. There are lighter tones of saddle that go all the way to black ones. Though you can select any color, here are a few things that you should remember –

• The color of the saddle gets darker over time. Likewise, it’s mostly due to UV exposure, oiling, sweating, etc.
• Light color saddles reflect so much light that even a single stain will be focused.
• The saddle color you choose in the sample may differ from the original one. It’s certainly because the dye adsorption process may vary due to the quality of the saddle leather.

Choosing Leather: Roughout of Smooth Leather

If you are someone who is buying saddle leather for the first time, it may not be possible for you to know the difference between rough out and smooth leather. However, there’s a big difference, and we’ll make sure you choose the best one as per your need.

The texture and color of rough-out leather are completely different from smooth ones. You can easily define the difference just by looking at the picture. Usually, rough-out leather is the underside of the hide. Though it provides extra grip, it also grabs a lot of dirt and oil sticks that can make it appear darker.

When you choose rough-out leather, know that it can be mixed with smooth leather components. Smooth saddles often come in antique brown and honey colors if you look at the saddle. They are usually bright, while the rough out saddle leather looks old and dark in appearance.

Tooling the Leather –

There are so many designs that you can do leather tooling on the sides of the saddle. Though it’s fun, it also requires a lot of energy and artwork. Here, you can look at the type of tooling you may prefer for your saddle. They are as follows –

• Border Tooling – It is the tooling that goes around the seat, fenders and front of the saddle skirt. The design is in a uniform pattern and looks amazing on the saddle.
• Spot Tooling – The tooling can be done in some areas that are segmented. The design mostly includes a floral theme that’s unique and beautiful. It is usually on the skirt of the saddle, fenders or the top of the saddle horn.
• Spot and Border Tooling – As the name suggests, this kind of tooling goes on the border of the saddle skirt and other segmented parts as well.
• Fill Patterns – These are more traditional looking in appearance and almost cover a lot of the area of the saddle. More so, it has been widely popular in many western saddles for over the decades. Basically, you can tool your saddle design as you like so that it looks beautiful.

Get the Work Done!

Once you are done with every segment of saddle designing, you need to start with the assigning process. Also, we can only tell you how to design a western saddle, but it’s upto you to how you like it. If you don’t want to do it all on your own, you can easily go to buy a saddle online from us. Moreover, we also have a variety of products that you can purchase from our website.