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.

Show Stoppers: Artist Resins

As I said in last month’s Show Stoppers post, I am mostly an Original Finish collector. Artist Resins (ARs) are the scarcest thing in my collection - I, the person who breaks Breakable Things just by looking at them, even have more Breakable Things than ARs. There are many AR sculpts out there that I love (cough cough VINCENZO cough cough), but I’ve talked about my hesitation to drop a comma on things, and good paint jobs on ARs typically involve commas. The naked resins themselves are also Not Cheap.

Thus it is that I find myself with a mere five ARs to my name. Only four of them will make today’s post - this is a post about show models and my Veronka, despite being purchased in 2022, is still naked. I’m having a problem deciding on her color because that sculpt literally looks good in everything.

(Who am I kidding. She’ll end up bay.)

 

Given how long I’ve lusted over Vincenzo, I never thought a Walter - well, a pair of Walters - would be the first ARs in my collection.

But then Sheryl Leisure had a table at the Artisan Gallery at BreyerFest 2015 and had a bunch of painted Walters there for the incredibly cheap price of $125 each. I stood there and debated between the dapple gray and the caramel dun for like twenty minutes. Then it went like this:
    Sheryl: “See something you like?”
    Me: “I’m trying to decide between these two.”
    Sheryl: “How about both for $200?”
    Me: “Sold.”

 

I've only shown them once; the caramel dun placed 5th and the gray placed 6th. I don't remember which name goes with which model, but one of them is called Impulse Buy and the other is Steal of a Deal.

They’re slightly tippy and Felice the Destructor absolutely would have done them in, so they stayed safely in their boxes until we moved into our current house and I had a room with a door that closed. I probably should have redone their glamour shots with the better camera on my newer phone instead of using these ones from 2015, but there have been some Incidents in the horse room lately and suffice it to say, I'm afraid to touch anything.

 

 

The next AR to join my collection was this delicious Cromwell, painted by the incomparable Myla Pearce. His show name is Pompous Pete, though I just call him Pete for short. Pete was originally purchased and commissioned by my friend Heather B.

 

[It seems I can't get through one of these posts without Heather showing up somewhere.]

Heather brought Pete to a bunch of shows in the early and mid-2010s. I drooled over him every time I saw him. I’m pretty sure I voted him as the Overall Overall one time when the show holders asked the showers to vote. There is such depth to his paint job and the only words I can think of to describe his whites are “soft” and “touchable.” I’m not really a pinto person, and I’m definitely not a draft person, but Pete won me over the second I saw him.

Fast forward to early 2018, when Heather said to me, “Do you want Pete?” I wonder what my face looked like when she asked; I’m sure it was some interesting combination of shock, disbelief, and “Oh hell yeah!” Heather was intensely congaing Brishens at the time and didn’t have an original Brishen in her collection because most of them were decidedly greenish in tone, not the lovely liver color from the stock photo. Mine was less green than most, so Heather suggested a trade of her Pete for my Brishen plus a pitiful amount of cash. I still feel bad about how little it was; the blank Cromwell body probably cost her more than that. It was definitely a lopsided trade, but Pete going somewhere he’d be appreciated was more important to her than what she could get for him.

Have I mentioned she’s the best?

On January 8, 2018, we met up for the exchange, and Pete was mine.

I show the ever-loving hell out of him, despite the fact that (a) he’s a heavy wee thing and (b) he takes up a lot of room in the show tote and (c) I’m typically managing multiple OF divisions and/or judging something at the same time, so having to keep track of AR classes for one model is an extra level of challenge. He’s been on the table at 13 shows since I bought him and has only been entirely shut out of the ribbons once. With me, he’s earned 5 breed NAN cards, 5 workmanship NAN cards, a reserve section champ in workmanship, two section champs and two overall (entire division) champs in workmanship, and a Top 5 in Region 10 for workmanship. Myla did an incredible job on him and I am thankful every day that he graces my shelves.

 

 

This Denderah resin, sculpted by Karen Gerhardt, made his first appearance on my blog as one of my “Top 5 of 2025” models. I wanted to tell his full story then, but it’s show-related, so I saved it for here.

Quick recap - Denderah was a pandemic purchase in August 2020. He hung around naked until January 2025, when the perfect set of circumstances aligned to get him painted: I had finally landed on his color, Jennifer Danza had just opened commission slots, and my parents had gifted me some Christmas money, which I chose to put toward his paint job. (That last part will become important in a bit.) I sent him off to Jennifer with the instructions to make him a red bay shaded to hell and back, and he arrived to me in April, every bit as outstanding as I’d hoped he’d be.

In early June 2025, I took Denderah with me to a two-day show in Hammondsport, NY. We’ve got family up there on my mom’s side, so my mom came with me. Our cousin JoAnn graciously put us up at her house for the weekend, which was exactly a three-minute drive from the show hall, and she and my mom had a great time hanging out and catching up while I was at the shows.

They stopped by the hall on Saturday afternoon to see what the fuss was all about. JoAnn has always been intrigued by the hobby, and my mom said something like, “You talk about these shows all the time and I can never quite picture what you’re doing, so I want to see it for myself.”

Their timing could not have been better. Workmanship classes at these shows were split out from the breed classes, and the bay class was called shortly after they arrived, so my mom got to see me take Denderah up to the show table. A few minutes later, the judge finished up - and Denderah had a first place ribbon and a yellow NAN card in front of him. I’m pretty sure I squealed out loud and yelled “Mom!” across the show hall and held his winnings up for her to see.

As I said above, my parents have always been my biggest enablers and biggest champions when it comes to my collection. To have my mom help fund Denderah’s workmanship and be there to see him get his first NAN card for workmanship was the best moment of the whole weekend.

I’m pretty sure she would say that the best part for her was the huge ridiculous grin on my face when I brought him back to my table.

He went on to take earn a Top 5 rosette in workmanship that day, and then did the exact same thing on Sunday under a different judge. At a show in October, he took first in his class in both breed and workmanship, and also section reserved in both. His show career is just beginning and I can’t wait to see what else he does.

 

My next order of business with ARs is to get my Veronka painted.

 

Then maybe I'll finally get myself a Vincenzo.