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Bootstrapping is really flexible. I consider anything where you are breeding a higher papered horse to a lower papered horse to be bootstrapping. It's a great way to pump up the paper quality of your breeding horses quickly and start producing better PT show stock faster than doing the "even breeding" C to Yellow, B to Red, etc. pairs.

The method you're describing in your post is a good way to try to do bootstrapping at a mass scale starting from foundations, and have a whole herd that is geared that way.

So in theory you would start with your perfect or exceptionally perfect foundation mares. Then you have a few options for choosing stallions:

A) You can look for a *star or **star to purchase. Might be worth asking on the forum as I bet there would be some that other players would be willing to part with for a good deal. If you go this route pasture breeding is the cheapest way to go to get the most bang for your buck.

B) You can use stallions owned by other players which are publicly available for live cover or straws (if you can use straws). If you go this route there are a lot of ***star stallions available, which are the best possible bootstrapping options.

Once you have your first foal crop born it's up to you if you want to keep a colt or two for your own use, but the bootstrapping will be more effective if you continue to use a *star or better stallion instead of one produced in your early seasons of breeding. I would then use breeding advice (NOT strict breeding advice, all of your foals will fail that one) on your mares. Anything that passes breeding advice will be average or better for the possible foals that your cross could produce. Depending on what stallion you go with I think it's reasonable that you could have a decent crop of Blue Papered mares come out of that.

Your new fresh born mares won't be old enough to use for a few more seasons, so go ahead and keep breeding your foundation mares the same as before. You can keep using the same stallion, or switch it up and go with someone different next season.

Once your babies are old enough to breed, you just repeat the process and use those horses instead of your original foundation stock. Choose a *star stallion or better, use the same one as before or choose a new one. Whatever your personal preference is.

Pretty quick you'll start getting *gold mares or better, and have a really solid mare band that can crank out good quality show foals if you continue breeding them to *star or better stallions.