hi my name is tracy ross i'm a professional freelance groom and today i'm going to show you how to plat a mane okay so making a nice break in the main straight as possible clip goes in to keep everything out of the way a touch of spray good girl split the mane into three you don't need to be overly fussy when you split the mane into three like this it's not like the actual break that you do between plaits okay keeping it fairly loose at the bottom of the main bottom of the plattery and then going tighter as you go along there we go so again when you get down to the bottom sometimes you're going to find that you've got too much in one piece and not enough in another it's not a problem you can just feed a little piece out of one and into another which means you can get as far down as possible and then taking your thread you just put the needle through the middle of the last part of your plait around one side of it back through the middle trying not to get your finger caught in at the same time and then through the other side and through the middle and pull it tight that way it'll hold your plait then fold the rest of the long bit in by wrapping it around a couple of times back through the top and then start to roll up your plait and again just tucking in any little bits in the side this is going to be quite a big plat because obviously the further down i get her her mane the bigger her longer her mane is the bigger the plaits will get so perhaps slightly bigger than you would want but i'm growing her mane out so it's not quite as short as you might want to have it a couple of times through the middle back down through the base take your scissors trim off and you can just trim the little nibbly bits off it won't notice when you take the plaits out i promise there you go okay so now we're just talking a little bit about bridal paths some people make the mistake of making really big bridal paths the reason i have a bridal path is just so that when i'm putting on a bridle the mane is actually split nicely and you don't get bits all caught underneath and it looks really scruffy but as you can see she doesn't have much of a forelock so i didn't want to make a huge bridal pass so what i've done is cut one slightly further back than where the actual bridle would sit so it allows me to still be able to separate the main and the four lock but without taking away anything from her four lock itself and basically you can keep these trimmed quite easily you can do it with a little pair of clippers obviously being careful with a horse that is not used to clippers around their ears and heads or you can do it with a pair of scissors and you literally can and obviously again very carefully because you've got scissors you just literally trim tiny bits away it's actually slightly easier if you do it from the other side because you're working backwards with the hair you're obviously going to get it a lot neater if you can do it with clippers but this is ideal for horses that don't take welter clippers nice neat small bridal patch voila