The first process you gotta do is order all your supplies and leather. Checking your sides of leather are very crucial cause you do not want bad spots in the good pieces of where your going to be cutting. Then you place all your patterns out on the sides of leather for all the parts that will be included in the saddle. There are about 33 parts to a whole saddle. To cut the leather out, I used a round knife which is very sharp. Some parts can just be rough cuts that can be fitted and skived later but some have to be perfect straight cuts.
The saddle tree in this picture is what the saddle starts out as. The tree is custom made to whatever you order such as size of the horn, seat, cantle est. so they are not all the same trees. It’s made out of wood then covered with rawhide coating. I chose to pick a tree like this one because it’s more of a ranch/working cowboy type saddle and in fact my own saddle has the same tree in it.