A few months ago, a friend decided to try showing her Standard Poodle. The only problem? They live on a farm. And her grooming typically consisted of a day-long process of shaving whatever parts of him he would hold still long enough. So I decided to take on the challenge of making "Rockstar" show-ring ready. I was excited, I was ambitious...
And then this arrived on my grooming table.
Not an auspicious start, but I was still optimistic. I decided to clean him up and see what was under all the farm dirt.
I decided to go for a German clip, which looks something like this.
After a lot of brush, shaving, trimming, and a lot of shampoo, this was the results of our first session.
A good start, although he needed a lot more hair to really fill out the look.
So we waited about 8 weeks, and brought him in for a follow-up.
He came back a little muddy, but plenty fluffy! This time we did more shaping, trimming back areas that needed to stay shorter, and leaving areas that needed to grow fluffier, still keeping the feet, face, and ears shaved for cleanliness.
His owner took a nice picture of him out in the snow, "stacking" (standing square) in practice for the show ring. He was starting to look pretty impressive!
Another month, and he was back for his final pre-show groom. Here he is after a bath and fluff-up- no clipping yet. Much fluffier!
This time, instead of just shaping, we did a full body hand-scissor to carefully shape the hair exactly the way we wanted it- to maximize his strong points and camouflage any weak spots. The full process took a little over 6 hours.
We came a long way in just a few months, don't you think?
And here is is squared up nice and ready for the show.
Updated: Rockstar took Best Parti-Poodle and Best Male! Next show is in May, we'll be continuing to update his look as we go.
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