For a couple years now, whenever I’m going to a model horse show, I invite my boyfriend Chris into the horse room and ask him to choose a model for me to show. (I stole the idea from a friend who asks her husband to do the same.) Chris hasn’t always been enthusiastic about my collection - he gets nervous that they’ll break - but he plays along well enough for this part. If he picks one I already show, cool; if not, he gets to assign naming rights.
Thus far, his choices have been:
Thus far, his choices have been:
- A bay roan CollectA Mustang Mare, who looked like his horse in Red Dead Redemption II. Though the model is a Mustang, he named her Queen Aliquippa after a Thoroughbred of whom his parents were part-owners at one time; that’s also what he named his RDR2 horse.
- My volunteer Lipizzaner Mare Zeitgeist, who he named Lady Granrick. He dubbed our house Castle Granrick (a merger of our last names) when we bought it, and he wanted to keep with the royal theme from the first model, so Lady Granrick she became. She’s got several NAN cards with that name.
- A solid black DAH windswept Arabian. Chris has always been drawn to the Stones first, but often can’t pick them because I tend to judge the Stone division a lot. He initially had a little trouble coming up with the name, but it was football season, so he wanted to name it Raider after his favorite football team. I instigated him a little bit by assigning the final name of Viking Raider, a combination of both our favorite teams. He muttered something about cross-branding and triggering the apocalypse that I chose to ignore. For being a plain black Arab in a sea of heavily FCM’d models, Viking Raider actually holds his own in the show ring.
- A decorator metallic silver ISH, White Luna; he named her Fall Moon.
When I realized there would be an extra blog post in March, I wracked my brain for ideas of what I could do with it, but never settled on something I liked. A few days ago, in desperation, I said to Chris, “Go into the horse room and pick a model for me to talk about in my blog.”
He's a good sport, so he actually did it. He pointed to every silver-colored horse in the room - with zero doubt in my mind that he picked it because it's one of the Raiders colors - so that's what I'm talking about today.
I covered #B-CS-10497 Killington & Little Killington in my November New Additions post, and my #701705 Stablemates Mini Fanfare silver G1 Draft in my January Collectibility Spotlight post, so you can find them over there. Here are the rest.
Hamilton (also known as the Racking Saddlebred Stallion) isn’t one of my favorite molds, but I felt compelled to conga him when I won the BreyerFest Raffle model, Order of the Thistle, in 2020. I had the rare one, so might as well get the rest, right? I dutifully collected Hamiltons for awhile, but then they used him as the BreyerFest surprise mold in 2023 and I only liked one of the colors (the solid chestnut), so I gave myself permission to not conga them anymore.
#712445 Tahoe, a run of 1000 pieces in silver filigree, was the annual winter-themed web special in 2022. I didn’t get drawn in the first round, but did get picked from the wait list.
#712445 Tahoe, a run of 1000 pieces in silver filigree, was the annual winter-themed web special in 2022. I didn’t get drawn in the first round, but did get picked from the wait list.
This is #710200, just called Stablemate Keychain, who was a 2000 BreyerFest special run of 2000 pieces. I have a somewhat large conga of the G2 Arabian and this guy was on my wish list for quite awhile. I finally tracked one down for only $10 in room sales at the CHIN during BreyerFest 2023.
This ISH will make another appearance when I get to my FCM ISHs in May’s Do That Conga post, but she can have her turn here as well. This is White Luna, a run of 7 models produced in 2017. I looked at this model every day she was available on the site. I loved her metallic shine. She had a counterpart named Black Luna who was also very metallic, but a darker silver. I considered her, too, but was more in love with the lighter one. She was available for a good long while - probably at least a week or two, which is forever when you think about how fast Stones fly off the website these days - but I never pulled the trigger, and always regretted it.
In June 2023, one Thursday night when I was at my bowling league, my friend Kelly W sent a sales list from a local person who was offloading the majority of her collection at steeply discounted prices. In the sales list was a White Luna! Kelly contacted the seller for me, I sent a PayPal payment, and a couple days later, I picked White Luna up in-person. It is crazy to me that this model I’d wanted for so long lived with a collector I’d never met, less than a 20-minute drive away from me, and that waiting to get her meant I paid below what she would have cost me to order directly from Stone. I don’t typically believe in fate, but this is one of those times where I think I was meant to own this particular horse.
It looks like I’ll have the opportunity for bonus posts again in April and May; stay tuned to see what else Chris comes up with!
In June 2023, one Thursday night when I was at my bowling league, my friend Kelly W sent a sales list from a local person who was offloading the majority of her collection at steeply discounted prices. In the sales list was a White Luna! Kelly contacted the seller for me, I sent a PayPal payment, and a couple days later, I picked White Luna up in-person. It is crazy to me that this model I’d wanted for so long lived with a collector I’d never met, less than a 20-minute drive away from me, and that waiting to get her meant I paid below what she would have cost me to order directly from Stone. I don’t typically believe in fate, but this is one of those times where I think I was meant to own this particular horse.
It looks like I’ll have the opportunity for bonus posts again in April and May; stay tuned to see what else Chris comes up with!
