Sunday, February 13, 2011

Making a Fashion Statement

The past few days have been remarkably pleasant.

The weather finally broke, making the daily doggie duties a little less frightful; I even saw a pair of bluebirds during our walk yesterday afternoon. I also sold a few horses (yay, money!), finished those two malingering sewing projects, baked those scones, caught up on my sleep, and bought a few packets of flower seeds, just because.

(Nothing fancy or exotic: Zinnia, Columbine, Coleus and Hare’s Tail.)

I finished up the last crunchy bits of my 2010 paperwork, too; I thought I was done with it, but there was still a little bit of printing, hole punching and collating to be done. And now it is.

Today’s model horsey thoughts turn to my favorite Stud Spider variation, the one with four stockings:


There are a lot of different variations of the Stud Spider - left sock, right sock, no socks, differences in the blanket masking - but the four stocking version is probably the most distinctive. More casual collectors sometimes fail to appreciate the charms of the more subtle variations of this release, but this fellow is a little harder to overlook. Isn’t it something that the simple addition of three more stockings can make him look like another release, entirely?

But he’s not - rumor has it that he was the result of a little mix up in the factory, way back when. Exactly when, I do not know: mine came with his original brown picture box from the early 1980s, so if I had to hazard a guess, it’d be a little bit earlier in his modestly long run (late 1977 through 1989) than later.

I bought mine on eBay a few years back - I paid a little bit more for him than I wanted to, but I had missed out on a couple of them prior, and by then I had become a little obsessed with it. The price wasn’t really all that much - a little more than retail, I think - but I’m someone who does most of her horse shopping at the dirt mall. Anything more than "body price" feels like a rip off!

(Which makes that disturbingly popular "$1000 horse" thread on Blab right now completely alien to me. I had no idea that conspicuous consumption had become acceptable again.)

I’ve seen a few more since then, including one I bought for a friend at BreyerFest last year, but he’s definitely on the uncommon side. He’s more uncommon than many better known variations on more popular models. I’m sure he’ll catch on eventually; I’m just glad I got mine before he’s become fashionable.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have no idea how many socks mine has- I'll have to go take a look. I recall getting disgusted as a kid and taking a pencil eraser to the masking on his blanket to clean up the overspray. It actually worked really well, since his unpainted white plastic was already kind of shiny.

Anonymous said...

I'm with you all the way on the $1000 horse thing - I'm proud of my 'dirt-mall' finds & The only thing 4-figured in my collection is its quantity! Beautiful Stud Spider, too; you just have so much INTERESTING stuff!

I love coleus.

Anonymous said...

RE the Blab thread, you have a horse that is probably worth $1,000 even if you didn't pay that much. I"m still jealous (but happy for you) that you won the Glossy All Glory in the costume contest.

Anonymous said...

I don't do Blab anymore. They have a problem with my having an opinion about the fact that they all think they are right.