A Reintroduction

I am not completely happy with it – the curses of an artistic temperament, alas – but this year’s Sampler is up! 

It’s been up since early Thursday morning, but I wanted to do my shopping trip yesterday and I didn’t have time to make my formal announcement. My “trip” was unusual, but I’ll talk about it another day when I’m feeling a little less out of sorts.

(How unusual? At one point I was stuck in traffic behind the 2023 Corvette! That is not a typo, and no time travel was involved.)

As a bonus, I’ll offer up color versions of the pictures accompanying the Early Micro Runs article. I was originally going to include them in color in the Sampler, but I decided to keep it all in black and white instead. 

(By the way, printed copies will be available next week: I’m kind of wiped right now and I just want to chill for most of the weekend.)

It really is kind of remarkable that I have pictures of all these things, especially since I physically own none of them. I was present for raffles of the Rose Gray Proud Arabian Mare and the Red Bay Cantering Welsh Pony, but didn’t win either of them, naturally. Even back then I was not so lucky.

Oh, and for those of you joining us for BreyerFest, howdy! The current content has been a little BreyerFest-focused because it’s that time of the year, but it can – and does – change. 

I try to post about ten times a month (every three days or so) and while most of the content is about Breyer History, it sometimes veers off into other topics I am interested in, including: quilting, comic books, art history, old movies, gardening, and the weird stuff that only seems to happen to me (yes, I’m one of THOSE people!)

I’ve been collecting since 1974, been involved in the hobby since 1978, and I’ve done work for Breyer – off and on – since I published my first article in the original Just About Horses in 1985. I still occasionally do work for them, but as you’ll see, I’m also not afraid about calling them out when they sometimes do dumb things. 

I’ve done everything in the hobby from live showing to customizing to pedigree assignment (we called it “breeding” back in the old days!) but my first love has been researching and obsessing over model horse history, particularly Breyer History. 

I will confess that I don’t know everything, I am occasionally wrong, and I am sometimes a bit of a drama queen (if you didn’t already get that from the blog title). 

I also occasionally – and absolutely unintentionally, I swear – talk about models before they’re released. This is super-awkward because there are some things that I’m not supposed to talk about. 

Like the Corvette, time travel is not involved, and I make no claims of psychic abilities: I just know the market and the product well enough to be able to make better predictions than most. Whether I realize I am doing it or not.

And in case you’re going to ask, my social media presence is a light one. I have a pretty busy offline life, and other than this blog, my Internet activity is not a priority. 

I also do not have a Facebook account, and hope to keep it that way. Long story short: aside from the fact it is not a good fit for the way I socialize in general, I also happen to think that Facebook’s business model is doing more harm to the world than good, so I try to keep my interaction with it to a bare minimum.   

A Momentary Idyll

I am now in full Sampler panic mode, so outside of watering and varmint-trapping*, I now have to bid my garden adieu for the next week and a half. Which is a shame, because my Superbissima Petunias are starting to bloom:

On the plus side, the “use customizing as a creative distraction” plan seems to be working out for me. Here’s the current project, on the Mesteno’s Mother mold:

Looking good (and her head is not nearly that gigantic in person. I am a terrible photographer, etc. etc.) I just need to make a couple more minor cuts and bends, then it’ll be onto the “tin foil and super glue” phase. Then do a little more carving out in spots before I break out the epoxy. 

My goal with this piece is to make modest customizations, mostly to correct some of the more distracting conformation issues, but still keep her recognizable when I’m done. I also want to keep as much of her hair as possible, because that’s really what makes a Mesteno mold a Mesteno mold, for me. (That gigantic forelock had to go, though.)

I haven’t had much opportunity lately to be creative just for the joy of it, which is also why I pulled a Mesteno mold out of my body stash first. If any Breyer equine molds can be described as almost purely artistic pieces, it’s them. 

(The Modernistic Buck and Doe are their own thing entirely.)

I have no illusions of making her a competition-worthy piece. I just want to see what I can do with it. And bonus – anything I try after this will seem easy in comparison!

Anyway, the BreyerFest program is not only out, they’re offering us the opportunity to purchase a hard copy, which is great. I’m not saying that as a person who obsessively saved ephemera: documentation is the very foundation of the hobby, informing almost every aspect of it. Whatever you do, you need tons of reference materials, books, documents, photos, and file folders of stuff. 

They’re also slowly releasing photos of the Test Color auction items, but I’m mostly going to ignore them: that’s way too rich a game for me. 

I purchased my first Test Colors all the way back in 1985; the most expensive one was this little fellow, who cost me the princely sum of… twenty dollars:

That was about the price of a decent, moderately-in-demand discontinued item back then, so it was not outrageous. Though it must be noted that I did pay seven dollars apiece for a Dapple Gray with Black points Proud Arabian Stallion and Mare at the same show (Model Horse Congress), and less than that for the Test Colors I pulled from the Bentley Sales Company sales boxes. 

So I guess he was kind of expensive for me, at the time? 

Anyway, he’s not terribly showable, though I think he did a placement at the BreyerFest Live Show last year because he is certainly eyecatching. I kind of wish Marney – or whoever “finished” him – had gone the extra mile and painted his mane and tail black. Then again, Hess’s Stock Horse Family in general don’t get a lot of second looks these days, unless they happen to be heavily customized. 

Incidentally, I have a pretty messed up Standing Stock Horse Foal in my body box that just might be my follow up to the Mesteno. First things first, though…

*Local groundhogs treat our garden shed like a time-share.

Technical Difficulties

Let me apologize for my general absence over the weekend. Like many of you, ended up spending way too much time trying to buy any. darn. thing. during the Virtual BreyerFest Online Experience.

I have some other commitments to take care of over the next few days, so I will have the physical Samplers ready by the end of the week. I’ll let you all know when they’re ready and what to do.

Back to the actual official BreyerFest stuff….

While I eventually ended up getting almost everything I wanted/needed, and a Cheesecake too because he was actually available one of the times I refreshed the Store page and I went for it, it took me most of the weekend to accomplish this.

Benelli never showed as being available, Kelpie was available only once (and gone when I clicked on it), and while I did manage to “get” a Grab Bag once, it was cart-snatched from me during the checkout process.

Overall I found it to be an unpleasant experience that left me unable to enjoy most of the video content. Once I even got them to work. (Refresh. Reboot. Switch browsers. And so on.)

Anyway, I did get my four top choices for Ticket SRs, which was nice, though it did take an extended phone call to Customer Service to figure out what the heck went wrong with my second ticket time.

It gave me five choices, I picked the two I had originally selected, attempted to check out, and… then nothing. Everything disappeared. I think everything is fine now, but I can’t access my bank account at the moment to make sure there aren’t any outstanding issues because of course I can’t.

I can only imagine what kind of week everyone is going to be having at the Reeves HQ as they sort all this nonsense out.

I did better at the Virtual Show than I expected - either 31 or 32 placings out of the 182 photos(!) I ended up entering. No firsts, but three seconds, two thirds, and only one tenth!

I’ll talk in more detail about the show in my next post, because I haven’t quite finished processing/analyzing it all. As far as participating in the “actual” show next year, that I have not decided. (It’s simply not an analogous experience; if there’s another online photo show, yeah, maybe…)

Since the show was the only moderately successful/pleasant aspect of this event for me, in lieu of making a memory box of the event like I usually do, I’m going to make a quilt inspired by the ribbons I won, incorporating the fabric I purchased that never got made into Ninja Surprise Bags.

(Not using the actual ribbons themselves, because I like my quilts machine washable.)

And finally, to address an issue/question that might be coming up over the next few weeks regarding my absence from another part of the “Model Horse Internet”.

All I will say in public is (a) it was not my decision, (b) it is not likely to be resolved any time soon and (c) I am currently exploring other avenues to interact with hobbyists online. (I have a lot of my plate for the next two weeks, so it’ll be a bit before decisions are made.)

Being unable to be with most of my co-hobbyists in a meaningful way the one week of the year I want (and need!) to be actively social was probably the roughest part of this whole… thing. It’s been something I’ve been wanting to work on anyway, but just like this year’s BreyerFest, circumstances are forcing my hand.