Sentimental Journey: Nautical and JCP Huck

How is it April already?

I am neither clever enough nor enough of a prankster to pull some convincing April Fools shenanigans on this blog, so it’ll just be business as usual today.

One of the best parts of BreyerFest for me is seeing all my friends. I’m lucky enough to have a close group of hobby peeps who live close to me and whom I see on the regular, but there are plenty of others whom I only see at the occasional show or at BreyerFest. My friend Susan is one of those. 

Susan has a spectacular collection of models, mostly gray and mostly of the Spanish variety. Some of the pieces she owns are jaw-dropping examples of the best artistry the hobby has to offer. She rotates other models in and out of her collection on a fairly regular basis, and when she decides to switch directions with her collection and have a sell-off, she prices her items silly cheap. I remember when she decided to part with a number of her Stone Trotting Drafts at one of our local shows, and she had them priced at like $25 each. You feel like you’re stealing from her, but she insists that’s all she wants for them. I feel like she’s wired kinda like my friend Heather, where sometimes it means more to have someone get a model they really like than to make money on it.

These two models are examples of that.

 

 

I have a modest Big Ben conga - none of the rarities, but I have all of the regular runs and most of the high-quantity special runs they’ve released. This guy, #701500 Nautical, a run of 750 pieces for the USET in 2000, was on my short list of most-wanted models from the time I went to my first BreyerFest in 2010, but the ones I’d seen for sale were always priced out of my budget. 

When I saw him in Susan’s room during BreyerFest 2015, I prepared myself to be priced out again - but she had a mere $20 on the tag. Knowing how Susan is but also not wanting to deprive a friend of a fair sale, I said, “Susan, are you sure? He’s worth much more than that.” She smiled and said something like, “Yes, but I’m especially sure because you’re the one buying him and I can tell how much you want him.”

 

 

In 2006, JCPenney released the #410146 Pinto Half-Arabian Family through their Christmas catalog. I was well into grad school by then and had taken a large step back from collecting, so I didn’t acquire them at the time, and have regretted it ever since. The Susecion & Le Fire from the set don’t come up for sale often and command quite a lot of money, often $300 and up for the pair. This guy, on the Huck Bey mold, obviously isn’t any more rare than the rest of the set, but he isn’t as popular from a mold standpoint and is thus a little more common (and less expensive) to find.

Susan had him for sale, too, mint as mint can be, for half of what he normally fetches on the market. I am overrun with Araby-things in my show string and I tend to pick my Partly Cloudy Weather Girl over him for the Part-Arabian class, but he’s made the table a few times here and there. His show name is Bashir.

I got both of these models for less than I expected to pay for one of them individually, and it was clear Susan was just as happy about that as I was. The word that comes to mind when I think about the expression on her face is “gleeful.” Buying these two models from a dear friend is such a happy memory!

New Additions: March 2026

My purchasing in March was a heck of a lot calmer than the weather. The latter included multiple shelf clouds, severe thunderstorms, tornado warnings, flood warnings, and in mid-March, an unexpected 4-5" of snow (they were calling for a dusting to an inch). It was 80 with blazing sun, storming and putting down enormous volumes of rain, windy enough to knock down trees and power lines, or 35 and snowing/sleeting. My house continued to develop new and exciting ways to leak water, so that's been a good time. After successfully sealing a crack in the outside concrete decking that was leading to soaked carpet in the sunroom, the latest casualty is the head jamb over the kitchen door. I have no idea where the water is coming from, as the door frame is embedded in the brick structure of the house and sits underneath an awning, but I sure as heck watched water run and drip out of it in a steady stream during the storms on Thursday, and my kitchen floor was wet. Guess I’ll be paying someone to figure it out, because I ain't risking the Brazilian Koa.

I only purchased four models in March, two of which aren’t in hand yet, and I also need to talk about a purchase I made in February that contained an unexpected ride-along. I’ll start with that one.

In my February 2026 New Additions post, I shared a photo from a hobby friend of mine who sold me her Stone ISH Ima Shifty Goodbar. He was purchased on February 26; she shipped him out a few days later and advised me to look out for “a little surprise extra” in the box with him. I was thinking oooo, maybe a sticker or something, since Stone has been producing a lot of those lately.

 

Turns out she sent me a whole extra horse, the mini-me version in the same satin matte finish as the big guy! He was not part of our negotiations nor the price - when I messaged her with a pic of them together and about a dozen exclamation points, she just said, “Well, mini me was lonely and I only collect mini mes to go with the big ones. I forgot I had the little one. There he was alone on the shelf. Enjoy!” 

He is lovely in satin matte. I love the people in this hobby and their generosity.

 

 

This little guy is one that isn’t here yet, so the seller's photo will have to suffice for now. He’s Potion, a OOAK Chips Mule from the 2024 Moonlight Madness sale. I’ve been in love with him since I saw his original photos during the event, and this in-hand photo from the seller cemented the deal. The seller offered a discounted price for in-person pickup at a show next month; I’m not able to make that show this year due to the finals of my bowling league, but my friend Sarah is going and offered to transport. I’ll grab him from her in May when I attend the live show she’s hosting. Yay for enabling hobby friends!

 

 

In my most recent Other Makes post, I talked about my WIA models, and noticed my WIA Vincenzo’s right leg was somewhere in the vicinity of his ear due to his weight distribution. So I headed over to Triple Mountain to buy him a stand, and oops, a couple other things fell into my cart. This guy, #MK10001 Erren the Criollo Stallion, a run of 5000 pieces produced in 2022 for WIA, was one of them. I judged one last year at a local 4H show and fell I love with how dynamic he is, so now one lives with me.

 

He's got teef!

 

 

One of the other things to oops itself into my cart was this palomino CollectA, #88984 Andalusian Stallion, released in 2023. I’ve got the bay and gray, so it was time for the third color to join the herd.

I had one more CollectA purchase from Triple Mountain in my order, but he was a pre-order and won’t be shipping til July, so I’ll get to him then.

Happily, all my purchases this month were tiny and fit on the shelves! Now if I could just do something about the floorses …

Bonus Post: When Inspiration Fails, Ask the Boyfriend

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:

• 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.

 

 

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!