Beauty Parlor Day

Rose has been in boot camp the last week with my trainer CR. I decided that perhaps it would be a good idea to put her in training for the month to whip her into shape. CR reports that Rose has been great all week and is a lot of fun to work with. I'm delighted that she's enjoying her so much.

As CR has been working with Rose, I haven't been to the barn all week. I've been hoping that the temperature would go up so that I could start cleaning Rose up, sans gloves. Her yack mane has been in desperate need of being pulled for a while, and doing just a little bit here and there wasn't getting us anywhere fast. After yesterday high temp of 45ºF, and today's high predicted high to be 40ºF, I decided that today would be the day that we got it done.

Since Rose's mane was so over grown I actually decided to cheat a bit and use scissors to do the bulk of the mane "pulling". I know this doesn't help thin it at all, but it cleans it up rather quickly. I must say this is only the second time in my life that I've taken scissors to a mane. The first time was right after I purchased Rose. That 18" long mess had to go, and in a hurry! But I digress. Given that I'm more of a classic mane pulling person I decided to apply some more refined hair cutting techniques to today's beauty session. I just cannot stand the look of a blunt cut mane.

Instead of just cutting across the mane, what I did was comb the mane down with my pulling comb, holding the comb in place about 1" above the length of where I wanted the mane to terminate. Then using my scissors, I angled them up and cut the hair at an angle just slightly past vertical. Just like when I pull a mane I constantly stepped back, re-assessed my work, looked for any areas that needed adjustment and touch ups.

Finally, a respectable looking mane!

Finally, after all that, I did a tiny (about 5min) of pulling where there was an odd long hair here and there. I also brushed out her tail, and cleaned up her fetlocks, bridle path, goat chin hairs and ears.

Rose, all spruced up.

Now I plan to keep up on her mane on a regular basis as I used to. Unfortunately I got in a bad habit when I was pregnant of letting it go due to the delicacy of balancing on a stool and having a beach ball between us.

"Cookie for me? I was a good girl, I was." - Rose

Happy trails and swooshing tails!
•DS•