In fact, she won't have to travel very far to put together the intricate pieces, as the race comes to Saratoga. Garrett, whose family owns The Wishing Well Restaurant and The Brook Tavern, grew up around horse racing. Her late father was once the New York State Racing Commissioner.
She’s also worked for Calder Race Course in Florida. While working, she would study floral design at night classes. She’s been making blankets for three decades after asking the New York Racing Association why the horses who won on Travers Day — the marquee day of Saratoga Race Course meet — weren’t adorned with any floral blankets, like winners of other major races.
Flash forward to 2018, when NYRA asked her to step in to create the blankets for the Belmont. Now, she’s preparing nine Grade 1 stakes blankets. The blankets are all adorned with white carnations that Garrett gets through Dehn’s Flowers on Beekman Street, where she has a space to work.
“We celebrated Secretariat last year, so we put blue [carnations] into a lot of the blankets, blue and white,” she said. “The tradition obviously is that it's a pure white carnation blanket, so we’re back to that tradition again.” The 6.
5-foot blankets take many hours to make. It begins with Garrett sewing the blanket and then the night before the races she and about a dozen other people, if not more, hand sew on each of the carnations. The sewing takes almost seven hours.
“It takes a lot of volunteers and big teams and lots of .