Easy Stick Horse Tutorial

Quinn came home with a super fun project in honor of Rodeo Break next week. He needed to make a stick or hobby horse to ride in the kindergarten rodeo parade. I could help but it was his project. Naturally I headed over to pinterest to look for some easy ideas. I found plenty and while I didn’t follow any specific tutorial, you can check out my Rodeo Break Crafts board for some of the ideas that inspired me.

We used a few things I had on hand including yarn, filling (from an old pillow), a zip tie, and glue gun. I found everything else at the Dollar Tree: a mop, a 2 pack of handkerchiefs, a pair of socks, a pack of felt squares, electrical tape, googly eyes and twine.

I unscrewed the mop head off the handle and wrapped the handle in black electrical tape. While I worked on that, Quinn removed all the mop strands out of the mop head.

Next we cut and measured an equal number of yarn strands. The yarn we used was rather expensive for our simple project but it was the one skein I had on hand in a neutral color. I had no current plans for it and wanted to use as many supplies on hand as possible. So our horse has “fancy” and “cheap” hair. 😉

Then we stuffed the sock tightly with old pillow filling. We filled most of the sock but left some empty space at the end to stick the mop handle in.

To add the hair I threaded the yarn into a large plastic needle we had on hand and poked it the yard through the sock towards the back of the head.

Then we placed the matching mop strand perpendicular across the yarn strand and then tied the yarn over the mop strand.

Then we simply tied the mop strand over the first knot. It’s a very simply hair system that doesn’t require any true sewing or hot glue. We kept adding hair and ended up using 30 pairs of yarn and mop hair to get a good horse mane. Quinn attached most of our hair so it wasn’t really in a straight line, but it didn’t really matter. I filled in a few strands at the end and the mane turned out great. We ended up using ~30 mop strand/yarn pairs.

I used a hot glue gun to attach googly eyes and small black felt circles for the nostrils. Then I doubled black thread and made one long stitch to create the mouth.

I cut 2 quarter circles out of felt to create the ears. My first set were too small, so I had to try again. It really depends on the size of you sock horse and preference. I lightly pinched the felt together while sewing a couple of simple stitches to attach the ears to the head.

I pushed the end of the mop handle into the sock and after adjusting the stuffing around it, I used a zip tie to attach the sock to the handle. I covered the zip tie by adding the handkerchief to the horse. That way he is clearly a cowboy horse. 🙂

I used two pieces of twine to create the horse bridle. The first one was tied tightly from the nose to the handle, pulling the nose down a little bit. The second piece of twine was attached from the from the bridle to the stick to look like a set of reins.