How to Antagonize a Pony

In preparation for the Haunted Hunter Pace tomorrow, Barn BFF eB and I spent some quality time today sprucing up the mane and tail of her steed/my arch-nemesis/token barn devil pony, Lulu.

Pre-sprucing

The antagonization process is pretty simple - find yourself one grouchy white pony mare, bathe her, and then dye her mane and tail an obnoxiously loud color.  

dat yellow tail, though

Avoid close proximity to front and hind ends as much as possible.  You may have to bathe more than once to remove all dirt.  Once clean, the beast is ready to be spruced.  Er.  Dyed. 

sprucing requires gloves.

Ingredients: many packages of Kool-aid in color of choice + conditioner of choice + gloves + plastic bag of the grocery variety + copious amounts of Vaseline to avoid dyeing entire pony.

all bundled up

We used five packets of Kool-aid for the tail.  Lulu has a relatively thick tail for a pony, so maybe if you were to try this on a regular-sized horse, you could get away with 5 packets as well, but most likely for a full-sized sprucing you would need at least 8 packets, and if your victim pony doesn't have a white mane/tail, you might need more to get the color to be vibrant.  We didn't measure out the amount of conditioner that we used, just went with the ever-reliable eyeballing.  We definitely should have used more Vaseline in this area - some of the dye got on her legs in places.  Next time I would definitely Vaseline the entire back end from top to bottom, or try this on a less fidgety creature.  Once the tail was fully coated, we bagged it up and left it to sit while we started our attack on the mane.

She actually started to relax a little bit at this point, we think.

We were better prepared with the vaseline for the mane part.  Luckily, Lulu's is pulled pretty short, so not a huge risk for contaminating her neck with blue.  We used an entire box of single-serve Kool-aid pouches for this because eB had gotten two different flavors of Kool-aid.  Again, if your horse has a longer or darker colored mane, more would probably be needed.  Lulu's mane is also pretty thin.

Beyond thrilled. 

After all dye was applied, the sprucing was mostly complete!  I had to leave at this point to go to work, but eB basically just waited for the dye to set - around 30 minutes - then rinsed copiously to avoid stickiness as much as possible.

end result, courtesy of eB

I am super jazzed to see this in person tomorrow!  Lulu and eB complete the triad of me+Leo and Barn BFF S + her OTTB Wally.  Our costume plan is kickass.  Obviously.  We have a magical teal pony on our team.

Leo also got bathed, although his socks were not actually dyed purple.

Many, many pictures to follow!  Lulu is a notorious grump, Leo hasn't left the property since he arrived in June and has never seen a cross country style course before in his life, and Wally hasn't gone to a show since sustaining a tendon injury in the summer of 2015, so it should definitely be extremely interesting! AND FUN.  Wish us luck!