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.