Cornflakes

I’m somewhat short on time today, so here’s a picture of that fascinating Dapple Gray Old Timer variation with the Cornflake Dappling from the Dirty Pony Lot:

Large, irregular dappling, also known as “cornflake” dappling, is a variation that randomly occurs on resist or splatter Dapple Grays, primarily in the 1970s. It’s most commonly seen on the Proud Arabians, but is occasionally spotted (no pun intended) on other models that sported this style of dappling, like the #205 Old Timer.

While the #123 Dark Dapple Gray Running Mare and #133 Running Foal did have large dapples from their release starting in ca. 1962 onward, those dapples were restricted to their hips in a paint job that was uniquely their own during their 10+ year production run. 

I once saw – and almost purchased – a striking Dappled Smoke Running Mare from the 1987 Sears Wishbook “Graceful Mare and Foal Set” with cornflake dappling, at BreyerFest several years back. 

The fact that it does pop up so sporadically like that makes me assume it is either a truly random phenomenon and not something intentional (as so many early Breyer painting peculiarities were) or perhaps the handiwork of a particular but now-unidentifiable production worker at the factory.

Off to find an unoccupied window to sun him in! 

My LaFitte

The first concrete details of this year’s variations and finish splits are up:

https://www.breyerhorses.com/blogs/breyerfest-blog/2019-special-run-breakdowns

Originally I was going to write this next post about the variations and some other issues – and possible solutions – I had with BreyerFest this year, but my thoughts are still a little too disorganized, so I’ll go with my backup plan and show you my LaFitte instead:

He literally arrived the very moment I stepped out the door on my way to Kentucky: the mail carrier handed the box to me then said “Do you know your car door is open?”

(Uh, yeah?)

Until a couple of days ago, my LaFitte remained unopened, because BreyerFest got in the way, as it does.

I wasn’t lucky enough to get the blinkerless version, but I am okay with that – I have a pair of blinkerless Chicago-era Culls that I am pretty chuffed to own. If an affordable one crosses my path someday though, I will consider it.

Old Timer is one of those molds that I’ve always wanted to actively collect, but space and circumstances have worked against it. Whenever/if ever that time comes, I already have most of the “harder” to get ones, like the Reissues, the Montgomery Ward’s Alabaster, and of course the Vintage Club Gus.

(I love Gus!)

Only real rarities I don’t have are the McCormick Decanter set – which isn’t really hard to find, so much as it is expensive – and the 2002 BreyerFest Hat Contest Jake, who I’ve just accepted is never going to live at my house.

Test Colors on the Old Timer – especially from the Chicago (pre-1985) era – are somewhat uncommon, presumably because they either never saw a need to test new colors on him back then, or because that would also involve painting all of his fiddly bits, and they just did not have time for that.

But anyways, I love my LaFitte: the paint job is beautiful, intricate and completely suits both the mold and the theme – though I wish they could have somehow made the purple a little more obvious, for the King Cake reference.

It’s also worth noting that they appear to be experimenting with a new/different dappling technique with LaFitte – it looks more like a mask than hand airbrushing, but a little more subtle.

Personally I am fine with the hand-airbrushed dappling technique (I grew up with resist dappling, yo) but if this somehow leads to me seeing the words “fish scale” and “crapples” less often, then I would consider the change a net positive.

Latigo Dun It and Collecting Philosophies

Since I had a twenty minute window of free time Saturday, I went to the toy store to look at the Alejandros. 

The dappling was not optimal on the examples I had to choose from, so he was easier to walk away from than I expected. 

I’m not a stickler for perfect dapples – you know me, I’ll even buy models with really bad dappling just because it amuses me so – but on this particular release I think being fussy is probably the right choice for me. 

But you know who had almost perfect dappling, gorgeous shading and color? A Latigo Dun It, one who looked very much like his “press” photo:

I’m certainly not immune to the Smart Chic Olena mold’s charms, and Reeves is in the habit of finding the most fabulous paint jobs to put on him. Yet he wasn’t on my must-buy list before, until I saw this one in this store…

Isn’t it funny when you walk into a store expecting to buy one thing, and find yourself smitten with something else? 

I’ve always considered myself something of an “organic” collector – my collection grows in response to whatever I find in my shopping environment, and not necessarily out of a specific list of wants or needs – but it is always a shock when a model sort of throws itself at me like that. 

Which is sort of the point of adopting that type of collecting philosophy in the first place. I’d much rather see every model as a possibility – even ones I hadn’t seriously considered before. 

Whenever I’ve just going to look for a very narrow range of molds or colors, or only pieces I would deem “perfect”, I feel like I’m setting myself up for more disappointments than not. And life is full of enough disappointments, you know? 

It was more a matter of time than money or desire that made me leave the Latigo Dun It behind: it was a quick look at the clock and the sudden realization that my 20-minute window of free time was so over. The store was busy (other people were pretty happy with their Alejandros!) and I really had no time to stand in line.   

It’s still a possibility he’ll come home with me, eventually. If someone else hasn’t already snapped him up by the time I can swing by next.

(Looks at schedule, wonders when that is. Sigh.)

Funky Dappling: A Love Story

By the way, that hunch I had didn’t quite play out – there were no softly dappled Hwins at the store I went to last Wednesday night. Then I made the mistake of going to the Tractor Supply down the road, and guess what I found?

Not one, but two Chalky Hwins!

Normally I’d just buy the one and leave the other for someone else to discover, but as you can see, they are completely different. It was getting late and I have to get up unbelievably early for work, so I bought the both of them in hopes of making the decision later on.

The weekend has come and gone, and I’m still not sure which one I want to keep. Do I go with the darker one with the nicely executed polka-dot dapples, or the lighter and more Matte-finished one with the seriously askew dappling?

You’d think it would be a relatively easy decision, but it’s not. Well, not for me!

Unlike the rest of the hobby, I do not have a reflexive dislike of the newer, hand-airbrushed dappling technique. The ratio of good to bad to meh isn’t really all that different from the random resist dappling technique that was the norm prior.

You had beautiful ones. Terrible ones. Weird ones. You had lacy dapples, cornflake dapples, dapples in the mane and tail. Some were beautiful, some were awful, and some were just weird. But most of them were simply unmemorable.

A few years ago when they had some leftover Aintrees – the Dappled Rose Gray Cigar – in the Ninja Pit at BreyerFest, I almost purchased one that had to have been one of the worst hand-dappling jobs ever.

It was so bad it almost touched the philosophical definition of sublime. I am terrible at doing dapples and not all that handy with an airbrush, and even I could have done a better job. In the dark. Wearing oven mitts. It almost looked like a piece that was done to show the painters what not to do.

Terrible, yet still memorable: every now and again I’ll walk past the Aintree I did buy in the NPOD that year – a gorgeous Sample with subtle dappling and handpainted gray hooves – and lament that I didn’t rescue his terrifying yet strangely compelling brother.

Hence, my hesitation at leaving the second Hwin behind. She’s not quite as terrible as that Aintree was, but the combination of being a scarce Chalky variation with bad dappling is giving me serious pause.

I don’t think I can afford to keep both, though. I planned on listing a bunch of stuff in various places over the next few weeks, so I’ll see if it’s possible to make room for them both.

Meet the New Guys, Same as the Old Guys

Silly me tried to upgrade something I really didn’t need to upgrade, with the usual consequences:

As experience should have taught me by now, this older Classic Quarter Horse Family was in about the same condition and about the same quality as my current set. The only significant differences were that this set has larger stars, and still has its original box.

The difference in the size of the stars is really quite striking, though:

There were no actual templates or masks for the stars on the early Classic Quarter Horses that I know of. Details that small were probably too difficult to create via the intricate metal masks of the era anyway, so they might have either tape-masked or resist-dappled them.

In some cases, even, they may have been created by paint removal – with a little dab of acetone on a paint brush or cotton swab, quickly blotted away.

In the case of the new set, I think they used the resist dapple technique – dabbing a bit of the resist-dappling goo on the forehead prior to painting, and peeling it off after painting was done. The plastic looks too raw and too clean for it to be anything else, really.

It is not really a surprise that such a minor and labor-intensive detail on non-portrait (non-Adios) releases like the Classic Quarter Horse Family disappeared so quickly. That’s a bit too much work for not quite enough reward.

My original, smaller-starred set’s better provenance (it’s the one mentioned in Nancy Young’s book!) outweighs the bigger stars + original box of the newest set, so the new guys will likely be heading to my sales list soon. Or whenever I can actually find the time to update it.

Getting Lucky

Regarding sales: I’ll be suspending sales for the next couple of weeks to deal with the usual beginning of the year stuff. All of my spare AQHA Horses will remain here for the time being.

Shopping, alas, got started a little early this year. The first haul, from Saturday:

A Hartland Our Lady of the Fatima, a Red Mill Unicorn, two yards of pink and white calico, and a fabulous pair of shoes. The Hartland will stay, the Red Mill will go, the fabric is a perfect match for a long-stalled quilt project, and the shoes are for what I’m now calling “The Carmen Project”.

A mixed bag, but it’s not like one can go thrift shopping with a specific list in mind; some imagination and improvisation does help. If I went to these places looking only for Breyers, or very specific Breyers, I’d walk away more disappointed than not. I prefer to approach every object I find as a maybe, rather than a nope.

You’d think that it would make list making and the obtaining of grails a rather frustrating effort, but I’ve long since adapted to that by adjusting my sense of scale: my grails and lesser wants tend to stay on my want list for years, not weeks or months.

It helps, too, that I sometimes get lucky – this year, quite literally! Two of the releases in the Vintage Club are molds that I actively and enthusiastically collect: the Traditional Man o’ War, and Western Prancing Horse, a Resist Dapple Gray named … Lucky!

(Is that dappling in his mane? Gosh, I hope so.)

The Western Prancing Horse was the second or third model in my collection, after the Man o’ War: I received both a Pacer and the Western Prancing Horse the following Christmas, but I don’t remember which box I opened first.

(Hey, it was a long time ago. How long? He is a Chalky Smoke.)

Aside from Test Colors – which are not too scarce on this mold, just expensive – the Western Prancing Horse is not a difficult mold to collect. It’s not without its challenges: the Black Pinto is a little rare, there are multiple variations of the Black Leopard Appaloosa that might drive you crazy, and Chalkies of both the Smoke and Palomino are very pricey.

The only one that could qualify as a true “Grail” piece would be the Chestnut, a model so scarce that I didn’t even bother putting it on my want list to begin with. And then he happened:

The best kinds of grails are the ones that never even make it to your want list.

Wild and Crazy

I’m pretty beat today; most of my free time over the past two days has been spent gardening, and I hurt all over. I haven’t had the time to work on it seriously before, and it shows.

First, a brief recap of the goodies from Sunday:

A Breyer Embajador XI, an adorable Napco Bulldog, and a Beswick Foal!

I already have the Foal, and this one has a slight glaze flake on his ear anyway. The Bulldog is stinking cute - that wrinkly face! - but I’m trying to cut back on my non H-R Chinas due to space reasons. So neither one gets to stay.

The Pluto is a keeper; I’ve been eyeballing them on eBay, but I wasn’t quite willing to pay retail plus postage for one. The paint job is wildly unrealistic, but it just works on him, you know? Most of the other Pluto releases have a certain sameness to them. They’re not unattractive, but their similarity to each other doesn't exactly inspire any passion in my heart.

Some of it is a function of the breed the mold is supposed to represent - most Lipizzaners are some shade of Gray, it’s true - but with a color as variable as Gray can be, you’d think they would at least try to be a bit more daring with it, no? Or even mix it up with an historical color or two, maybe?

It's not like he's the most realistic mold in the line, anyway. He's a portrait of a Foundation stallion, and he doesn't even have boy parts! Why not put a wildly improbable Baroque-styled Black Pinto on him, just for kicks? The polka-dot leopard in this year’s "Let’s Go Riding - English" set is a good start; I would be such a happy camper if I could find one in the Sample boxes this July. (With even more spots, I hope!)

Some Embajadors do have that over-the-top quality; more conservative ones have fewer, more polka-dotty dapples. Lucky for me, I did get one of the wild-and-crazy guys. (Dapples in the tail for the win, yo.) I don't know which one is the scarcer variation; he's not a heavily collected mold in the first place, so I doubt it matters much, price wise.

The China miniatures that I left behind last week also reappeared. Unfortunately my "poker face" slipped, so I had to pay full price for them - no group discount this time! Ah well, the combined price for all 30 some pieces still works in my favor. Except for the keeping-most-of-them-for-myself part.

Many other oddments were purchased, including a sheepskin (for the car), some vintage quilt scraps, a stack of late Victorian magazines with amazing engravings, and a bag of silk ties for a future quilt project.

(BTW, for those of you who may be interested, I may be turning "pro" with the quilting thing in the near future - blogging and pattern making, at the very least. When time allows, of course.)

Next up, what everyone else is talking about: the Giant-Sized Foal-Thing!

Absolutely Fabulous

It’s going to be another short one today: after the week I had at work, even getting out of bed seemed like a stretch. Just as I was about to surrender to sleep again, Vita jumped in bed and gave me a dirty look: nothing like a guilt trip by a dog with a reputation for being a late riser herself. 

The only advantage to not being home most of the week (besides the alibi) is that I appear to have missed some assorted dramas on the Internet. Good.

Let us instead, in this slightly calmer corner of the model horse universe, focus on my current favorite-horse-ever from this year’s NPOD: an Aintree, a 2012 BreyerFest Tent Special on the Cigar mold.

There were lots of Aintrees available in the sales tent this year - like other Tent Specials I have noted, he was one whose overly high piece count didn’t quite match up with the demand.

Aside from the piece count being a little too high, his paint job was prone to paint flaws. The semi-chalky paint finish Reeves decided to go with, while it added a certain depth to the shading, also tended to drips, runs, and puddling. I’ve been seeing similar problems on the Regular Run Palomino Marwari release, too.

The amount of dappling the paint job required was also, in my opinion, too ambitious for something with a 1400 piece run. Though most of the ones I saw were at least passable, the bad ones were truly unforgettable. So much so that I am beginning to regret not buying an Aintree of that caliber that I found in the tent that morning, as well. (You’d think I’d learn by now not to pass by anything that catches my eye, good or bad...)

As you might have guessed by now, this particular Aintree is not one of the leftovers: he is also a Sample. Or more: aside from his lack of BreyerFest stamps and VIN number, his finish is not semi-chalky. His front hooves are also handpainted dark gray, not airbrushed, and his dappling? Absolutely fabulous. It's some of the nicest dappling I’ve seen on any model, Regular Run, Special Run… or Test Run.

It would not surprise me if he did turn out to be more than just a Sample, but an actual Test or Display piece. Aside from a couple of minor (fixable) flaws, this guy is truly live show quality.

I briefly considered that he might have been the photography piece, the one used on the web site and other promotional materials, but the shading doesn’t quite match up with the one photo off the web site. Just because he doesn’t match up doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not what I think he might be: as I’ve been trying to drum into everyone’s heads for a while now, Samples and Test Colors are not necessarily unique.

Being unique also does not necessarily enhance the value of a Sample or Test, either. The style or quality of the paint job, the popularity or desirability of the mold, the suitability of the color to the mold can (and often do) plays a bigger part in a model’s perceived value, versus quantity made.

Regardless of his technical status, I love him. Not as much as the next model I’ll be showing you, but once you see HIM, you’ll understand why.

(And those of you who know who I'm talking about, already do.)