Two Lovely Ladies

Pretty quiet day at the flea market today. Plenty of things worth buying, including a ten-foot-tall unicycle(!) But all I left with was a bag of bagels and a good reading copy (with dustjacket) of Mistress Masham’s Repose, an odd little obscurity by T.H. White, whom most of you may know as the author of The Once and Future King.

I’ve now reached the point in my BreyerFest prep where everything is either going wrong, or falling apart. My scanner died, the dog ate (yes, ATE) my new umbrella, the humidity is like 3000 percent and wreaking absolute havoc on all my assorted projects, and I just paid way more than I wanted to on some new glasses that probably won’t be ready in time for the trip.

Oh, and one of our lovely neighbors has been setting off fireworks - loud, prolonged, and probably illegally obtained - for the past week. Vita doesn’t like them. Really, really doesn’t like them. Kind of hard to get any work done when the dog’s barking her fool head off every night for a week.

(She’s normally not the much of a barker either. It really is just that bad.)

So yeah, I’m a little cranky tonight.

There was a brief discussion about the "Sorrel" Classic Quarter Horse Mares over on Blab, so I thought I’d share mine here. I found these two lovely ladies in the Bentley Sales Dump Bins during my first trip to Model Horse Congress back in 1985:


I found a matching Foal the following year:


My mares did not come out of the six-piece special run batch the other known Sorrel QH Mares came out of. First, they’re not Chalky; second, their markings are quite a bit different from the Chalky ones, and from each other; and third, the rough quality of their seams seems to indicate that my girls were, more than likely, not SRs but actual preproduction Test Colors.

The mares were my first true Test Colors, if I’m remembering correctly. Test Colors weren’t super-hard to get back then, but funding (then, as now) was a bit of a problem. These two mares were mixed in with all the other bodies that Bentley Sales was allowed to take out of the factory to sell, following the sale to Reeves, and were priced like bodies.

As you can see from the photos, they really are body quality, so you’ll never see them competing for anything except shelf space.

If they went through the bother of testing both the Mare and the Foal, the Stallion has to be out there somewhere, right? I was kind of hoping that I’d find the matching Stallion at my third Model Horse Congress, but that didn’t happen. Either he wasn’t in the boxes, or someone else got to him before I did.