My (wrong) Attempt at Thinking Like a Cowgirl

Hello all,

     This post upsets me a little, but only because my attempt failed. My sculpture teacher gave us an assignment to pick a somewhat common object and to create a model of what it may have looked like several decades ago. The example he used was a watch. Now, a watch looks rather modern (then he showed us his hi-tech waterproof fancy watch). A hundred years ago, a watch would have looked quite different. He wanted us to really get into character to do this. We had to research a person who may have created our object in the past, and really come up with reasoning for the decisions we made about our object. 

     Since my current mission in life is to become a cowgirl, I wanted to make this project related to walking horses. The object I chose was a pair of stirrups. I thought about the first Celebration taking place in 1939. This was a hard time for farmers and other in agricultural fields, because of the Great Depression. If your stirrups broke, you were just out of luck if you couldn't afford new ones. If I was a cowgirl working on a farm, and I needed new stirrups, I would cowgirl up, and make them myself.

     I started looking up pictures of stirrups, and there are about a million different kinds. That did not make my project easy, because I didn't know what kind of stirrups to make. My logic is that if I live on a farm during the depression, I'm going to make something functional. So I made the simplest, functional stirrups I think of. This is what I came up with (It's bigger than the picture looks). I left all my edges rough, because if I'm working on a farm, I don't really care what it looks like, I care that it works. 

     I showed my project to Christy, and she told me that even the simplest of all stirrups had a loop at the top for the leather strap of the saddle to go through. So even though I was wrong, I learned that all stirrups have a place for the saddle strap to go through. This gets me one more step closer to being a cowgirl, a very small step, but I'll take it! And I got a good grade for my project, which is also important.
     Even though I was wrong, Christy let me try it out. I didn't like it, purely because I didn't feel like it was going to hold my weight for me to climb on, but it did work!

Cowgirl out.