Stephanie Dunkin a horseback riding, animal loving, blue jeans wearing, jeep driving, dirt digging, grits eating, tomato growing country Texan girl living in Alabama makes these wonderful folk art stick leg horses.
They are hand sculpted in stoneware, hand painted, stained and washed, and outfitted in hand dyed and stained antique and vintage textiles. Each horse is given a name and a story eg. Effie pictured above is a beautiful blend of free-spirited bohemian, elegant Victorian, grungy primitive, simplified folk and rustic country. She’s got a touch of industrial, too, with her smoked and blackened stick legs. She’s definitely the Grande Dam of the farm’s stick leg horses.
Effie is very different from the other horses on the farm. Most horses become unsettled and nervous on windy days, but Effie loves the wind. She stands so peacefully posed with her nose to the heavens welcoming each gust of wind. Her forelock even has a backward curl, or flip, that’s firmly set from her nuzzling the wind. Stick leg Effie is a snapshot sculpture of her wind loving pose.
And then there is Belle whose favourite colours are red and green.
Belle is the lead horse for the town parade's Christmas sleigh. She can hardly contain herself when the daylight becomes shorter and the weather turns cooler. She runs and hops all over the pasture like she's a reindeer practicing to pull Santa's sleigh. I think she's pretending that she's Rudolph because she'll spend hours in the pasture tossing a little red ball up in the air trying so hard for it to stick on her nose.
Belle's favorite colors are red and green, and even though it's not Christmas year-round, she's not the fashion conscious type and prefers wearing her favorite colors everyday. She knows that red and green aren't just saved for just Christmas display anymore.
There's even a brand new foal
Little Etta is Mavis’s first foal and Mavis is so proud of the cute mini-duplicate of herself that follows her around all day.
The outfits that Mavis and Etta wear are very special. They begin with an authentic, mid 1800, early antique cotton fabric remnant from a tied quilt. The fabric reminds me of an old Victorian floral pattern in burgundy and beige tones and is so old that it feels like fine silk.
Stephanie sells her horses, and other wonderful creations through her Etsy shop Farmhouse Mud do pop over and see more of her herd of stick leg horses.
