Thanks guys and you are welcome! Aye Stacy, the Bruce. A copy of his grave plaque from the floor of Dunfermline Abbey. Course his heart is buried at Melrose on the border, looking south. Ay looking south.
woodwrkr the ring is to hold a tie rope. A tie rope is a short piece of rope usually about 10 ft long. When leggings (chaps) have them like this pair the tie rope is centered over the connecting string in front and then both tails of the rope is fed through the ring. I cary one on the back of my saddle, some guys will carry like this on their leggings.
This pic was from my son riding heifers for a large local ranch last spring. So what that means is these are first calf heifers that are about to calve. This particular batch of heifers (about 200 of them) were having aa lot of problems. About every 3rd one needed assistance. So every 2 hours for about 2 months he would ride through this pasture checking the heifers. if one was having trouble he would rope it, throw a trip, lay it down, tie the front feet, have a GOOD horse hold the back and then you are probably shoulder deep seeing what the problem is. If its gonna be an extended period of time you'd probably tie the back feet too, usually to the front feet. All the blue ropes hanging on the saddle are extra tie ropes. This is big boy cowboy stuff so a guy needs to be handy and mounted cause you are doing this by yourself for the most part. Ya can see the Buddy (the horse) knows his job well and is using his weight to keep the heifers hind feet off the ground.
There's lots of different ways of doing things and some of it is regional. If ya got two ropers ya can just lay em down like my wife and I did here. Head em, heel em and the ground crew will take the head rope off stick em on the front feet and go to work. Salty is rapidly making this bull calf into a steer, with Shotgun Stewie standing by with the branding iron. No "tie" ropes used this way just "catch" ropes.
So on the chap trade the whole project was to make something similar to dad's.
Kinda took me out of my comfort zone because I've made hundred and hundreds of different pairs of leggings but never this style. This chap style is called AZ bells. I've made: chinks, charmitas, armitas, shotgun chaps, batwing chaps and even bear hide woolies but never a pair of AZ bells. Never made this type of pocket before here on the right leg. Its called a mitten pocket.
