Stripping 101 . . . The Final Reveal!

As promised, this is an update post of the process of stripping Max. After the last photo it took me a few days to reduce his coat to what I like to call "The Royal Ruff" - pun fully intended:

As you can see he is as happy as ever at having his photo taken.

Finally, I got around to finishing the entire grooming process. Now, I should say that while I have all the confidence in the world that given the inclination and time I can beautifully strip the body of a Border Terrier, I have no such confidence when it comes to the head. Each time before attempting Max's head again I carefully go over all the head shots of Border Terriers in the various books I have as well as looking at photos on the internet. I have spent no small amount of time in pursuit of this knowledge needed to groom the perfect Border Terrier head, but I am sorry to say I still wind up making him look more like a Schnauzer than a Border. It's embarassing really. I've come to believe, however, that the problem is that I only groom him twice a year, and the head needs to be maintained more frequently. I'd like to say I will try to address this issue this time around, but I expect that in 6 months time I will be lamenting the same sad fact. Anyway, here's the picture for which you have all been waiting:

No, I did not cut off the tail to avoid showing you the overstripping that occurred there - I'm just a really bad photographer. But there you go. He's done, if not perfect. Over the next few weeks I will continue to pull off the various missed hairs that are far longer than the others and in about 1.5 month's time he will have filled out his top coat and look quite handsome. Until then, this is about as good as he is going to look: