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.

Other Makes: Stone Thoroughbreds

Heading back into the realm of Stones for today’s Other Makes post.

 

 

The first Stone Thoroughbred to join my collection was Butter Pecan, a 2014 release from their Show Line series. I bought him in August 2014, when prices were a hell of a lot more reasonable than they are now - he was $68 shipped. [For comparison, the average price of a Traditional in 2025 (excluding Best Offers and DAH) was $512. Pretty frustrating.]

Anyway.

The Stone Horse Reference site describes Butter Pecan as a chocolate palomino, but he looks sooty to me. I typically don’t like cream dilutes unless they’re sooty, and I definitely don’t like them glossed (they’ll go too orange or two yellow in a heartbeat), so I left this guy matte. He shows well for me with documentation for the color. Of the 25 times he’s been on the table, he’s only been shut out of the ribbons twice. His show name is Good As Gold.

 

Next to arrive was this bright chestnut, Severance. For a brief period of time, Stone had a second website called Stone Ponys, which had its own separate inventory from the regular Stone site. I bought Severance from the Stone Ponys site in August 2015 and had him glossed. While I love the color and think he looks better in gloss than he did in matte, he has an outrageous amount of lint on his neck.

 

 

Having painted a model at the Stone factory in 2019, I’m pretty forgiving of lint, but I mean, look at that. This guy looks like he rolled around on one of those fuzzy velvet coloring pages right before he got glossed. He doesn’t show for that reason.

 

Captain Wentworth, a run of 10 pieces from Equilocity 2013, was my second-biggest Stone grail for a really long time. (In case you’re curious, Boaz was grail #1.) Superbly shaded red bays are my biggest weakness when it comes to model horses. I had a chance to buy him from the Stone site after Equilocity 2013, but couldn’t pull the trigger, and then kicked myself for years afterward.

On the evening of August 29, 2022, I posted an “In Search Of” ad for him on the Peter Stone Sales Page on Facebook. Not even three hours later, I got a PM from a hobbyist in New Zealand who had him for sale, and the rest is history.

His best show outing was just this past October at Steel City Live, where he won his class in both breed and collectibility and also section champed in collectibility. His show name is Zealand.

 

 

I think this guy is one of the prettiest Stone Thoroughbreds they’ve ever made. He is the non-customized version of Prince William, a run of 5 from Equilocity 2019. I bought him in September 2024 after I damn near drooled all over my phone screen upon seeing his ad on Facebook. His show name is Teenage Heartthrob and he has absolutely kicked ass in the show ring since I got him, with four NAN cards to his name already.

There are 22 Stone Thoroughbreds on my wish list. All but one (a rare buckskin) are bay, black, dapple gray, or some shade of flaxen chestnut. (I have a type, okay?) My biggest wish is a glossy bay with an ocean wave tail, like Cherish the Moment.

Fantastic Finds: Glossy Palomino Fighting Stallion

I've made it to post #50! 

 

I had no idea how this blog would go or if I'd stick with it. This started as a "me" project, and mostly still is, but I've been pleasantly surprised at how much interest and interaction there's been, and that has kept me going even when my stress has been through the roof and I don't feel much like writing.

 

One of the ways I like to manage stress is to go out liberating, and one of my favorite antique stores in the greater Pittsburgh area to liberate from was Crown Antiques down in Washington. It’s where I found my birthday surprise chalky buckskin Mustang in 2014 and a bay Stock Horse Stallion autographed by Rich Rudish. The mall lost the majority of its tenants between 2016 and the end of the pandemic, and is currently being redeveloped as mixed retail and a business park. Crown Antiques closed in June 2019 and relocated to Uniontown.

 

In September 2015, before the downhill slide started, I found this guy.

 

 

In one of the booths, high up on a shelf, he was hanging out with a ton of Family Arabians. I had to pull said Family Arabians down to get to the Fighter tucked behind them, and their price tags made me cringe - $60 or more each. I thought, “Gosh, if they want that much for the Family Arabs, what outrageous amount will they want for the glossy palomino Fighter?”

The answer, happily, was $40.

 

 

I snapped this picture of him in the store because I couldn’t believe my luck. He’s in amazing shape and still has remnants of his foot pads, and he’s a gorgeous soft honey caramel color. #33 King, The Fighting Stallion was produced from 1961-1973 and had quite the color range during that time, from soft honey caramel like my guy, to pale orange, to bright orange, to darker tan.

He doesn’t come out to play much in the show ring because I have a gazillion stock horses, but when I do show him, his name is Crown Jewel.