October (Model Horse) Surprises

Gah! So many goodies out right now – Gideon, Coeur de Lion, the Premier Club Shagya Arabian (a Shagya at last!) and now this bizarre Test Color Clydesdale Mare THAT I LOVE:

It looks like the kind of Test Color my nine year old self would have designed! If my parents had been rich, and they had had the “Design Your Own Test Color” back then.

Alas, I blew my wad on the trip and I really need new tires, so most of these end-of-year items won’t be coming home with me. The upcoming Silver Filigree will probably be off the table, too, whoever it may be.

I’ll make an exception for the Mare of course, and possibly for the Nonhorse piece, especially if it’s one of the molds I think/hope it will be, like a Zebra, Elk, Deer Family Set or Saint Bernard. Though both the Mare and the Nonhorse are unlikely anyway, since I haven’t been getting drawn for those kinds of things lately.

(I’ll cuss if it’s the Saint Bernard – that’s one collection I had some hopes of keeping complete.)

Most of my purchases for the rest of the year will be of this type, all inexpensive recent Salvation Army finds:

The white kitty with the black tail tip is my favorite. I have no idea who made it – I’m guessing it’s Russian or Eastern European, since it came with the striped Art Deco Cat, made by Hollohaza in Hungary.

And box lots, too. Here’s one of those pieces from that lot I was so excited about last week:

Yes, that’s another “Transitional” saddle, this time a gray to match my tan.

On yet another Western Prancing Horse, that both baffles and amuses me.

It is funny that the two Transitional saddles I now own – and a third that I almost purchased, locally – were all found on the Western Prancing Horse. Funny because this is a saddle that was designed for the Western Horse, and that’s where most of the rest of the hobby finds theirs, when they do.

While it’s possible that some Western Prancers were released with Transitional saddles, because that’s just the weird kind of stuff that happened back in the Chicago days, I’m going to chalk up my personal experience to a sampling error.

In this case, it was in a lot that came with some spare pieces, so I’m going to assume this is a case of parts getting switched around and/or lost.

I can also partly attribute it to the fact that I’m one of those handful of collectors who actively collects Western Prancing Horses. Even though my collection is technically “complete”, I always give them an extra look when I’m cruising the Internet. Sometimes, I am rewarded.

Mostly with oddball Black Leopard Appaloosa variations … and now, apparently, rare saddles.