Sentimental Journey: Nottingham

I’ve been fortunate to volunteer at Breyerfest 11 times - as a Seminar/Workshop Attendant in 2011, a Diorama Contest Volunteer in 2013, and the results guru for the Children & Youth Live Show every year since 2016 (except 2020, when results were automatically done through the PonyBytes website and there really wasn’t anything for me to do).

In exchange for roughly 8 hours of work, completed in a single shift or broken up over the course of the weekend, volunteers receive an exclusive model. Quantities have varied; when BreyerFest first started and was a much smaller event, volunteer model quantities were as low as 30-50. From 2000 through 2019, the quantity slowly increased each year. In 2020, Breyer split the colors on the volunteer models for the first time with Ben Nevis, who came in both bright chestnut pinto and liver chestnut pinto. Splitting the run into multiple colors to keep quantities down became standard practice in 2023; for that year and each one since, three colors have been offered on the same mold, with the quantities of each hovering around 130 pieces.

I used to get really, really serious about trying to predict the mold that would be used for each year’s volunteer model. Had a spreadsheet and everything. (What? Me? A spreadsheet? You don’t say.) It was fairly easy to figure them out through 2013, since Breyer always put a copy of the volunteer model in the auction. Of the 28-30 Live Auction models, it wasn’t hard to distinguish which paint scheme(s) could translate well to a run of 100-200 models vs. those that clearly had OOAK-level detail. 

In 2014, Breyer stopped putting the volunteer model in the auction, so that made it quite a bit harder. Still, there were patterns. The mold they chose tended to be either a same year regular run or previous year regular run, so that narrowed the choices quite a bit. Since 2012, all molds chosen had been a non-BreyerFest Special Run in the past six years, so that helped as well. Until Carrick blew up all my volunteer mold prediction algorithms in 2016 when they used him for like a hundred things at BreyerFest, the volunteer mold had also never been a same-year SR. When Croi repeated this egregious sin in 2023, I stopped taking volunteer mold prediction seriously. I still do a spreadsheet every year, but there aren’t any noticeable patterns I can rely on anymore, so it’s pure speculation.

[I don’t think work would support me tossing all the data into a Power BI on my work laptop for better analysis, but I can’t say I haven’t been sorely tempted.]

Though I now have twelve volunteer models to my name - I earned two last year by also stewarding Breyer’s online fall show, BOO - there’s one who is more sentimental than all the rest, so he’s getting his fifteen minutes of fame today.

 

 

This is #711430 Nottingham, the volunteer model from BreyerFest 2011. I’d had such an amazing time at my first BreyerFest in 2010 that I decided to toss my hat into the ring as a volunteer for 2011. Given that I was so new to BreyerFest, I only chose the Seminar/Workshop Attendant option, even though I knew that might limit my chances of being selected. On Sunday, June 5, I got a call from the volunteer coordinator that she’d picked me! 

My schedule was Friday from 9:30 - 3:30 at the seminars in the Visitor’s Center (which worked out awesome, as that meant I didn’t have to miss my friend Penny’s collectibility seminar) and Saturday from 9:30 - 11:30 at the workshops in the gallery above the Covered Arena. I was not sad that all my volunteer time was spent in the nice air conditioning instead of the sweltering Kentucky-in-July heat.

Sometime on Friday, we found out that the volunteer model was Nottingham. I love the Silver mold and bay roan is one of my favorite horse colors, so I was really happy it was him. When one of my seminars ended early, I wandered out into the Visitor’s Center lobby, where all the Live Auction models were on display in glass cases. I remember looking around the lobby, soaking in the feeling of being in what had quickly become my favorite place and my favorite event, and looking at Nottingham in the case, and looking at my volunteer name badge, and feeling really lucky that I was there and that I would be getting such an awesome model. Fifteen years later, I still clearly remember that moment.

I’ve liked all of my volunteer models, but Nottingham is extra special as my first.

New Additions: February 2026

 

This guy, until a couple days ago, was going to be the lone wolf for February acquisitions.  He’s #0985 Vic, a run of 200 pieces from 2001. According to the 2005 Stone Base catalog, he was produced for the Lawrence, Kansas Little Big Horn Celebration and Show Dinner and was sold by Happy Trails Collectables. I bought him off a Facebook ad from someone who was selling off overstock from a relative who had been a Stone dealer in the past.

He has a paint flaw on his chest that the seller didn’t see and wasn’t clear in the pictures - a large whitish area, like he was attacked by a rogue airbrush. I messaged the seller to see if that was normal for the run, and she said it wasn’t, because none of her others had been like that. She didn’t have any stock left to replace him with, so she offered to take him back for a refund. That was super nice of her, but while I was initially pretty disappointed with the flaw, I'll never find another one that cheap, so I declined to send him back. I’ll just find someone to fix him someday.

As you no doubt have guessed by now, Vic wasn’t the only thing I spent money on in February.

In my last post (literally, the one from Wednesday), I wrote about Mini Me Ima Shifty Goodbar, and mentioned how I’d hoped to add his larger counterpart on the ISH mold someday. Writing that post prompted me to put up an ISO ad for him on the Peter Stone Sales Page on Facebook.

Ask and ye shall receive.

A relatively recent (within the past couple years) hobby friend of mine messaged me on Thursday that she had one that she’d sell. She offered to ship him, but her house is literally right next door to my cousin JoAnn. (Small world!) My mom and I are going to visit JoAnn this summer, and my friend didn’t mind holding onto Shifty til then. Saves us both from having to worry about him in shipping. Until he gets here for his “official” glamour shot, here’s one my friend sent me.

 

 

Between the words “Shifty” and “Goodbar,” there are so many fun directions I could go with a show name. Side-Eye Snickers? Treacherous Toblerone? Shady Skor? Cagey Clark? 

I think I like the last one.

Singles Bar: The Letter C (Stone Edition)

I had so many singles on molds starting with C that I had to break it up into two posts. Last month was Breyer. This month is Stone.

 

Like Breyer, Stone has multiple scales of models; their Stablemates-sized equivalents are called Chips. Breyer’s average Stablemate costs about $4, while the average Stone Chip usually costs over $100, so I don’t have very many of the latter. The only Chips in my collection that won’t be featured today are my two Chips Arabians - because they’re not technically singletons.

 

 

This guy was the first Stone Chip I owned. His issue name was Barbados and he’s on the Chips Rearing Horse mold, which debuted with this run of 200 pieces for Equilocity 2012. I hand-picked him over at the Marriott next to the CHIN, where they were hosting that year’s event. He has been one of my most successful show models, with 25 breed ribbons, 18 collectibility ribbons, 9 breed NAN cards, 5 collectibility NAN cards, and a few Reserve Champs. His show name is Antilles, after the Lesser Antilles island chain, of which Barbados is part.

There are 12 Chips Rearing Horses on my wish list, so Antilles won’t be alone forever.

 

 

The next Chip to join my herd was Mini Me Ima Shifty Goodbar, a run of 15 on the Chips Stock Horse mold made for the All American Quarter Horse Congress show in 2017. He’s modeled after the 2016 Congress Queen’s horse of the same name. 

I attended the AAQHC model horse show that year, where Stone was a vendor. I instantly loved the color, but was waffling on buying him, until my friend Beth talked me into it. Someday I hope to acquire the larger version of the same release on the ISH mold.

I’ve taken Mini Me Ima Shifty Goodbar to 8 shows, where he’s earned 6 breed ribbons, 5 collectibility ribbons, 5 breed NAN cards, and one collectibility NAN card. Not too shabby! His show name is Corn Spot Hot Shot, which has made at least one judge giggle (looking at you, Riker, if you’re reading this).

There are 17 Chips Stock Horses on my wish list, with Mini Virginia and Mini Me Bellame at the top.

 

 

Next to join my Chips collection was this little dude, Angel, a Chips Stock Foal produced for the 2018 Warehouse Sale. He wasn’t purchased at the time of the sale and was given away as a prize during the Stone Horse Country Fair event in 2019. I honestly don’t remember how I won him - that night was a blur. That was the first and only time I attended any Stone event; they were still doing the Paint-Your-Own offering then, and I thought it would be super neat to paint something at the factory, so I made the trek. You’ll see the model I produced in a later post (spoiler alert - okay, not really - it’s a glossy bay).

Growing up, I was obsessed with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, so it’s pretty cool that this little guy ended up with me. His show name is Button. He has NAN’d in collectibility at two of his three shows.

There are 8 Chips Stock Foals on my want list, with number one being Mini Me Black Iris. A friend of mine has one and I drool over it every time I see it.

 

 

In January 2020, right before the world went to hell in a handcart, I ordered a couple Design-A-Horses - a bay roan extreme tobiano ISH and this guy, a chestnut-going-gray Chips Andalusian. He was painted by Audrey Dixon, one of my favorite Stone artists. His show name is Eternal Optimist.

There are 13 Chips Andalusians on my wish list.

 

 

In recent years, Stone has done a bunch of grab bag releases, similar to Breyer’s blind bags and gambler’s choice models. This Chips Mule, Mini Scrooge, was a grab bag release for the Classic Literature Series in December 2023. I typically stay away from Stone’s grab bags because I usually only like one or two of the models offered, and $150 is a lot to pay for a high chance of getting something you don’t like. The Christmas Carol grab bags were all outstanding, though - I liked every one of them - so I hopped onto the website right at drop time on 12/22/23 and managed to snag one. The gray Arabian and the spotty Mule were my top two choices.

The spotty mule is who I received, so that made me really happy. There were 5 produced. His show name is Eggk. I didn’t like anything I was coming up with when trying to associate his name with A Christmas Carol, so I turned to the list of random names I keep in my phone. Eggk was borne of a text misspelling between me and Heather B (see? There she is again!) We were discussing her BreyerFest Collector’s Class earlier in the year and she’d meant to say, “I guess he’d work,” but her phone somehow translated that to, “I guess he’d so egg k.” And my response was, “Gonna name a horse Eggk now.” He’s NAN’d, so that’s his name for life.

I’m not typically a mule collector, so there are only 7 Chips Mules on my wish list. Two are rainbow, two are blue and green decorators, two are bay, and one’s a grulla pinto.