BlairH

I never considered going to an over/under 3 pattern, sounds like something worth a try.

You described it well, I never thought about pulling to the side versus down. I'm sure I pull down too much in this case.

Thanks for the help, I can't wait to try it out with some wider strings.

Thanks, I'll try wider strings. In case my description was not clear, I would braid down and when I got to the bottom where I would turn back the ends the backside of the button looked like a couple of criss crosses, not the nice pattern on the front side.

Howdy! I am working on a pair of rawhide 8 plait reins. I am working on the romal and am having a problem with one of the buttons. I am doing a short version of the multiple string button that I learned from Neubert's video. I start with 6 strings and braid them down. So far so good. The problem is that it looks great on one side but when I turn it over I have a lot of spaces. In the case of this short button I braid all the way down to where I want to turn the ends back and it only covers half of the other side. I am considering a different button in this instance since the foundation is pretty big where I have spliced the braid back around where the romal swivels. I ran into this before on the reins but got around it by going from 3 strings to 4.

Sounds simple enough, thanks!

Just got back from a trip to Chile and Argentina. In Buenos Aires I bought a rawhide headstall with split reins. The man at Arandu (the store) told me the headstall is cow hide and the buttons horse hide. The rawhide is very soft and has a great feel to it. I am curious how that is obtained as I would love to make some. I have access to cow, calf and horse hides to work with. I also got to visit with Alejandro Alvarez in Areco and ordered a pair of hobbles with some fine buttons. Here are two pictures: