The latest news

Congratulations Kelly on your outstanding entry in the ‘Make your Own Video’ competition. Check out Kelly’s winning entry on Riley.

Kelly utilizes a range of Cowan Cavalletti products. The Skinny Lizzie set is placed one stride in front of  a large cross oxer which she jumps both ways.  Kelly also sets up a a square shaped pattern of Original Cowan Cavalletti. She jumps Riley into the centre of the square, lands and jumps out. Kelly does this bounce from different directions. Sometimes a canter change of lead is made, other times the lead is changed by doing a flying change on a corner. Kelly makes a bounce grid with two Cowan Cavalletti Jumps with poles in their cradle set at a bounce distance apart together with the Cowan Cavalletti Poles. One of the poles is used as a ground pole, the other three are made into a vertical jump.

Both Kelly and her mount, Riley make the exercise look incredibly effortless. Well done on this outstanding entry, we LOVE it at Cowan Cavalletti.

Get ahead with your training with the easy to use Cowan Cavalletti.

Here is one of our simple pink and white traditional 3 stripe Jumps. The Jump is the replacement for our popular Original cavalletti. This one is the same height, (375mm high) as the Original but much easier to assemble. It just requires two galvanized two coach screws to be tightened to hold the pole in place.

Both our Versatile and Jump Cavalletti can be stacked for more training options.

Try our new fill, the Flower Skinny Mini. You can colour coordinate it to match your Cavalletti. The fill comes complete with 7 holes for you to add your choice of faux flowers. Its good to get your horses used to fill, and you would be surprised with how high horses jump faux flowers.

Something super fun, a “make your own video” competition!

I’m not going to make any rules, except that Cowan Cavalletti needs to be showcased. You may have a favourite exercise. Be creative, enjoy the process, use your digital skills. Get help from friends and family. Involve your horse, your friends horse, even your neighbour’s horses!

If you need access to Cowan Cavalletti, get in touch with me and I will see if I can put you touch with someone who has my products. Email me tammy@cowancavalletti.co.nz

The prize is $540 worth of Cowan Cavalletti products. Check out our shop for what you might like to choose.

Lizzie Green is known for her ability to produce stunning young horses but in just over the last year she has produced two very beautiful babies, a boy Archie and a girl Sienna. We are celebrating their births with the two colours that have come to represent the two sexes, blue and pink. For a limited time we will have Skinny Lizzie available for sale in these Resene colours, Wet n wild, and Colour Me Pink.

The hugely popular Skinny Lizzie Cowan Cavalletti have always been green and white as it was international event rider and trainer, Lizzie Green who requested this cavaletti from us. She needed a safer jump to train her young horses over in preparation to jumping the solid skinny jumps on the cross country course. There are so many options for training with the Skinny Lizzie where the rider can start with a single cavaletti and then add height with additional poles, or stacked Skinny Lizzie. Check out Lizzie’s training video.

Both our Skinny Mini and Skinny Lizzie have been popular choices for dressage riders who generally want a pole free arena to practice movements. The Skinny’s barely take any space and the narrowness of them means that riders have to be very accurate with their riding. Riders love the way they improve their trot suspension and they are super easy to move around. “No arena should be without them.”

The picture includes:
One Skinny Lizzie set with a blue stripe,and matching Skinny Mini in blue.
One Skinny Lizzie set with a pink stripe and matching Skinny Mini in pink.

A big congratulations to Dannie Lodder who rode Kingsguard winning the best placed Event Stars sourced horse in the Beyond the Barriers competition at Equifest 2020. Cowan Cavalletti has been a supporter of Event Stars re-homing efforts and we thought it appropriate to give away two of our new Jump Sets in this competition in the Event Stars colours- See Dannie Lodder jumping them.

Kingsguard, also known as Kingy is an 8 year old bay thoroughbred gelding by Rip Van Winkle x Her Royal Highness (Volksraad) successfully raced winning just over half a million dollars. Dannie was pleased that his owners Rodney and Gina Schick gave her the ride. He has a “good brain, stamina and energy”. As a previous winner of the Dunstan Ex-Factor Dannie enjoys this competition; her advice to potential competitors is “Just do it, its so much fun!”

Beyond the Barriers is an organisation run by Gina Schick and Nicky Wallace showcasing the versatility of thoroughbreds over a variety of events. Every year competitors take a horse straight off the track and train it to compete in a variety of sport horse disciplines. Many have trained them as a sport horse for only a few months, and some up to a year. Check out some fantastic video coverage on – https://www.facebook.com/beyondthebarriersnz/

The colours of these Cowan Cavalletti sets remind us of that super yummy dessert ambrosia, but ambrosia word has an even more important meaning!

Ambrosia is a delicious dessert made from berries, strawberries, yogurt, marshmallow, and whipped cream all mixed together. Ambrosia is also famously known in ancient Greek myths as the food or drink of the Greek gods that confers a long life or even immortality upon those who consume it.

Check out our limited edition Mini Cowan Cavalletti painted in Marshmallow pink. See it online in our shop or at our stand 036 at Equifest 27- 29th November at the National Equestrian Centre, Taupo.

The Resene paint colours used are Merino, Ballerina and Pompadour.

We have crossed our Knee-high stand with our Versatile cavalletti set up to come up with our Cowan Cavalletti Jump and then added a pole in the cradle to make a set.

First of all we are keeping the price of the cavalletti the same as our Original cavalletti $205*, plus the pole $65*.

It’s the same height as our popular training jump the Original. If you are wanting to train at a higher level, pop the pole in the cradle and you can give your horse a better work out, either ridden or on the lunge. There is no need to buy 2 different types of jumps when one, plus the pole can do the job.

We freight all our products around NZ unassembled with the stands in a box and the pole wrapped separately. The Jump is super easy to assemble with just two galvanized bolts to screw in.

The Cowan Cavalletti Jump is compatible with our system of stackable cavalletti and we recommend stacking the smaller cavalletti on top for extra training options. So many options to make your training fun and effective.

If we don’t have the colour option you want in our shop, please request it in the order notes and we will make it.

*Fairy Dust added costs $10-20 extra with the two extra UV Resene paint coatings, which includes glitter the tone of the paint chosen for a shiny, sparkly glamorous finish.

Due to popular demand we have added a purple to our range of colours. The Resene colour is called ‘Pompadour’.

We always team it with white (Merino) and you can choose from other combinations of colour: metallic gold (Gold Dust), pink (Colour me Pink), dark grey (Grey Friars) and red (Havoc).

We have also added a UV clear coat with glitter to make the purple sparkle! see our Exotic pink/purple jumps with fairy dust.

Turn your pile of poles into a nice ordered system on display and off the ground. Ideal when you want to harrow an area and have spare poles for storage.

Our pole stands are made of H4 timber with custom cut stainless pegs. The pegs are 1445mm apart and the 1330mm high stand can take 11 poles.

As with all our painted products we paint them with one coat of Resene undercoat and then apply two top coats of Resene waterbased Lustacryl paint.

The stand is easy to assemble and so its easy to move around when the stand has not poles on.

Congratulations to Isabella on her beautiful entry to our colouring competition at the 2020 Horse of the Year competition.

Equestrian artist, Rosemary Parcell and founder of Cowan Cavalletti, Tammy Cowan attended to the many budding artists who dropped into the Cowan Cavalletti stand. The level of talent and tenacity shown was exceptional and we wished we could have given the 3 Skinny Lizzie sets to more than one person. While the riding competition was happening outside in the arena’s the Cowan Cavalletti stand proved to be a quiet relaxing place to retreat.  A nearby stand were offering free slushies which added to the relaxed atmosphere in the Cowan Cavalletti stand.

Answers to questions on the back of the colouring compeition : –

The two constellations in the pictures are: Pegasus (the largest), and Equuleus (the smallest).

The similarity between the smallest star constellation and cavalletti is that they both mean “little horse”. Equuleus is Latin for little horse and cavalletti is Italian for little horse.

Come visit our stand in Horse of the Year event,  10-15th March in Hastings, NZ. We will be located at the end of the Premier Dressage Arena. This is a chance for Cowan Cavalletti to show off our latest colours, designs and for us to interact with our customers. We will be bringing a range of jumps and poles to inspire your training.

In addition to our new gold dust ‘royal’ range we are introducing a new Resene colour of purple called ‘Pompadour’ to our range. For those who want o fix their untidy pile of poles, we are making a pole stand, similar to the one in the photo but our new one will hold 11 poles. The frame is made of H4 treated wood, painted with 3 coats of paint and the pegs holding poles are designed for poles that are 100mm in diameter. We hand cut aluminum to length and turn the ends on a lathe before galvanizing them. The galvanizing stops aluminum oxide from marking your poles with gray marks.

We are very fortunate this year in being able to exhibit the artist, Rosemary Parcell’s horses at our stand. Rosemary has a unique skill of painting horses that look full of movement, and ready to jump Cowan Cavalletti!

Everything equestrian will be at HoY including competitions galore, the best in NZ’s top talent will be riding, trade stands, dining and hospitality options. Something for everyone. Please drop in for a chat,

Tammy.