Fantastic Finds: Honey Bay PAM & PAF

Well, it’s 3:48 p.m. as I’m sitting down to write this, and my posts always go up at 5:00, so time management issues are still A Thing right now. Work didn’t get any better as the week went on and I ended up having to put in some extra time in the evenings. 

On the funnier side, my Dad sent me a picture this morning of an asteroid with our new EHR’s name on it and said it was a close-up of the one that streaked almost directly over my sister’s house in Ohio on Tuesday and was visible from Pittsburgh. That inspired me to put the new EHR’s name on the Miley Cyrus wrecking ball meme, because it has made everything about my job 200% harder. 

I’ll take the laughs where I can get them.

I’ve already covered most of the knock-your-socks-off liberations in my collection, so now I’m moving on to the not-earth-shattering-but-still-cool liberations.

 

 

I picked up these two almost a year ago from an antique mall in Ohio as my friend Kelly W and I were driving up to Michigan for the BVG Live show. The Proud Arabian Mare is #14 Sheba and the Proud Arabian Foal is #15 Shah, both produced from 1958-1959. The production run on the early PAMs and PAFs was extremely short due to the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Hagen Renaker, as Breyer directly copied HR's Zara and Zilla molds for the PAM and PAF (respectively), so the late-50s PAM and PAF releases are a little harder to find and tend to be more expensive. The 50s honey bays and alabasters are significantly more common than the gray appaloosas; the latter tend to fetch thousands at auction.

Both of these honey bays are both pretty scuffed up and need restored, but Kelly thought the price was reasonable for their condition and talked me into getting them. At the same store, Kelly nabbed a Cybis Donkey Foal and a Hagen Renaker DW English Bulldog, pictured below with my PAM and PAF. A successful liberation for both of us!

 

Show Stoppers: Stone Mini Light Breeds

I covered most of my Stone minis in last month’s Singles Bar post - all except the Chips Arabs and my four Pebbles. I’m not able to find pics of my two Pebbles Drafts at the moment and (as usual) I’m pressed for time, so today we’ll just cover Stone Mini Light, and I’ll get to the Drafts down the road.

 

 

This handsome chap is Mini Me Winter Wonderland, a run of 10 non-customized Chips Arabians painted by Audrey Dixon. (Apparently my love of Audrey Dixon paint jobs is not confined to just bays and chestnuts.) I got him from the Warehouse Sale in December 2018. He was something like 50% off, so how could I say no?

I had to name him something from the song, of course. I almost picked SNOWMAN! (in all caps like that, with the exclamation point) because Winter Wonderland always reminds me of my dear friend Aaron from undergrad. One night, near Christmas break in 1997 or 1998, we got shit-faced and started singing that song as we wandered through campus in the snow. One of us would sing, “In the meadow we can build a snowman,” and the other one would yell at the top of our lungs, “SNOWMAN!” For some reason, that stuck with us, and to this day, we still text SNOWMAN! to each other every so often. The most recent occurrence was a month ago.

I didn’t want judges to think I was yelling at them, though, so I went with Parson Brown for his name instead. He’s done pretty all right for himself, with four breed NAN cards and two collectibility NAN cards in his six times on the table.

 

 

This gal was from my early-2024 “Buy Stones from Australia” era. (Seriously, all of my January and February purchases that year were Stones from sellers in Australia.) She’s Mini Me Bernadette, a run of 25 Chips Arabians in gloss for one of the Eureka Live shows; Stone Horse Reference doesn’t specify the year, or the artist who painted her. There were also 25 made in matte. I fell in love with her color as soon as I saw her. Her show name is Aid and Abet. She took Light section champ her first time out.

 

 

This model was the first Stone mini to enter my collection. In 2010, I both rejoined the hobby after a hiatus for grad school and attended my first model horse show - the Chesapeake Regional All-Halter Bash (CRAB) show in Maryland over Halloween weekend. Chesapeake Bey II, a bay Pebbles Arabian, was made just for the show. In an email from the show holder, we were told there were only 20 made, but the Stone Horse Reference site says there were 30; it was so long ago that I don’t remember how many were actually on the sales table. We submitted our names for a drawing if we were interested, and my name was drawn in the first five or so, so I got to hand-pick a really nice one.

She’s been on the show table 48 times - more than any other model in my collection - and has amassed quite the collection of ribbons and NAN cards in both breed and collectibility. Her show name is A Cappella.

 

 

This is Applewood, a run of factory customized Pebbles Arabians for the Springamathing live show in 2012. Her run size is unknown. I bought her online direct from Stone after the event. She has also been on the show table quite a lot, 37 times, and does just as well in breed as her sister A Cappella, though she is not as competitive in collectibility due to her unknown (and therefore assumed to be larger) run size. Her show name is Worth the Wait because it took a loooooooooooong time for them to get her out of the factory and on her way to me. I ordered her on September 3, and she didn’t get shipped out until the very end of October!

Don't Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth: Great Spirit sets

A bit of a shorter post today; I find myself with a dearth of mental energy due to how chaotic work has been. I’m a Clinical Data Analyst (aka Giant Data Nerd) and my organization started switching to a different instance of our Electronic Health Record in late September, which has made my job ... interesting. No mapping was done for some of the things that changed (like patient visit types and appointment scheduling modes), so the data between the systems doesn’t match, and figuring out how and why and then wrangling the new data around to match the old data has been nightmarish. I want to have enough brain left to keep up with these blog posts, but it’s a struggle at the moment.

For today’s Gift Horse post, I needed something both easy to write about and easy to photograph, so I’m visiting Christmas gifts from 2001 and 2003, when JCPenney produced several sets of models with “Great Spirit” in the name, symbolizing (according to the COAs) the “Great American West” and spirits of animals valued by Indigenous People of the Great Plains.

 

 

#410201 Great Spirit Mare & Foal set was produced in 2001. No piece count was ever released for this set. They were just called "Breyer Paint Mare & Foal" in the catalog, but came with a COA with the Breyer-issued name above. The bright flaxen chestnut Marabella has a bear shape on her flank; if you squint, you can see it on mine. The masking went a little askew, so the bear's eye is up underneath its ear, and it also looks like it has a camel hump. The bear is much easier to perceive on other copies I've seen. 

 

She was my second on the Marabella mold; the foal was my first on the Ashley mold. I got them for Christmas that year from my parents.

In 2002, JCPenney released the Great Spirit II set, called Legend of the Wolf. The molds were Buckshot and Phantom Wings, and the Buckshot had a wolf in the pattern on his side. I’m not a fan of those molds and don’t currently have any of either in my collection, so I didn’t ask for the set that year.

 

 

#410703 Great Spirit of the Mighty Eagle III was produced in 2003, again with no piece count released. I got them for Christmas that year from my parents. The set represented Mustangs with an eagle pattern on them. The eagle is easy to make out on the Running Stallion, though the foal's head is hiding a good bit of it here. 

 

The COA doesn’t name them individually, but the JCPenney catalog called the Running Stallion “Kwahu” and the Action Stock Horse Foal “Alo.” Both were the second of each mold in my collection, with the #810 Action Appaloosa Foal preceding “Alo” and Rumbling Thunder preceding “Kwahu.”

 

I ended up with a second set of these guys when I bought a small lot of random models from a local Pittsburgher selling her collection through Craigslist. The duplicate set found a new home during BreyerFest 2012.