2026 BreyerFest Bonus Post #1

Surprise! It's the week of BreyerFest!

 

I had a great first day and felt like posting, so here we are. I'll share a few pics of my journey, and then the models I bought in room sales this evening.

 

BreyerFest wouldn't be BreyerFest without this nerd taking cloud photos. This was a small thunderstorm that went up over Columbus, OH, on my drive. I caught the bottom edge of it; it only rained for a few minutes.

 

 

Mandatory annual pictures of the Hell is Real sign between Columbus and Cincinnati, and the Florence Y'all tower. This is my fifteenth in-person BreyerFest, but I still take those pictures on every single drive.

 

 

As soon as I snapped the Florence Y'all pic and rounded the curve, this nasty-looking sky was staring me straight in the face. I had always intended to stop at the rest stop just past the water tower, and I stayed an extra few minutes to let the storm pass. Luckily, it looked worse than it was.

 

 

Annual mandatory pic of the Big Bone Lick State Park sign.

 

The moment of arrival ... and the infamous CHIN carpet.

 

We decided not to set up or open our room for sales tonight, and walked around shopping and checking out the renovations-in-progress instead. I took photos of some of the random things we found, like the phone from room 432 sitting on a bucket in a stairwell, and box of shower curtains in the hallway in the 400s.

 

[I can neither confirm nor deny the occurrence of a discussion with my roommate about snagging one of those new curtains from the hallway after we discovered that ours is barely long enough to reach the bathtub, let alone provide adequate coverage against spraying water. I anticipate at least one flooded bathroom floor in our future this week.]

 

This is a blog about my collection, so I guess I should get around to sharing my two purchases this evening.

 

 

This Merrylegs is from the 1992 Sears special run set #496092 Horses Great and Small set. I bought the grullo Clydesdale in my childhood collecting days, and found the black Cantering Welsh Pony a few years ago at an antique store. I was just missing the Merrylegs, and set out to find one this year at the CHIN. My friend Jackie had two of them in her room, and sold me one.

 

 

This handsome guy is a OOAK Stone Arab named 50 Shades of Gray. He was released in 2015. The seller posted him a few months ago on the Peter Stone Sales Page on Facebook, and I started a message to her about buying him probably a dozen times, but could never hit send. She had him with her in her room sales, and I couldn't walk away after seeing him in person. My parents gave me birthday money and some BreyerFest spending money, and he's what I chose to spend that on. I'm thrilled to have him!

 

Not sure how much time I'll have for other blog posts this week, but my regularly scheduled ones will still go up on Wednesday and Saturday. In the meantime, happy BreyerFest!

On a Regular Basis: 2025 CHIN Shopping

By the time this posts, I should be in Kentucky!!!

In honor of BreyerFest, and in honor of what may the last year of room sales at the CHIN and might be the last year of room sales ever (sob), today’s post will be about the regular runs that I bought at the CHIN last year.

 

 

This is #1359 Tommy Turvey’s Pokerjoe, a regular run from 2008-2010. I love the Adios mold, though I don’t have many of them, and I’ve always loved Pokerjoe’s red bay color and minimal tobiano pattern. He’s been on my want list for quite a long time, but I never managed to pick one up until last year, when my friend Sara had him for sale in her room for a mere $20. Sold!

 

 

Next up on the 2025 room sales acquisitions was this lovely chestnut Marabella, #1409 Let’s Go Riding English, a regular run from 2010-2013. Like Pokerjoe, I was in love with her color and shading and she was on my want list for a long time; I just never managed to acquire one. She was also only $20.

 

 

FINALLY.

I can’t tell you how many #410 Shams I’ve looked at over the years at the CHIN, trying to find one without a wheat ear. A common misconception in the hobby is that the Shams with the wheat ear on the chest are harder to find than the ones without a wheat ear. Fourteen years of shopping at the CHIN and dozens and dozens of Shams later, I’m here to tell you - the wheat ear is the common variation, and non-wheat-ears are really tough to find. Nancy Young speculated that the wheat ear marking wasn’t removed until sometime in 1988, the last year of production of #410, because some of the #411 fleabit gray Shams (introduced in 1988) also have the wheat-ear marking. (I have both versions.) I think that’s pretty solid reasoning, and explains why #410s without the wheat ear are so hard to find.

My search finally came to an end last year during my Thursday night CHIN shopping. He was reasonably priced at $25. Hooray! He happily joined his (cough cough ten) wheat ear #410 Sham brothers on the shelf.

I’m heading into this year’s room sales without any expectations, other than to hit all the open rooms at least once throughout the week. There have been years where I’ve skipped entire wings or floors; not this year. Not if it’s truly the last time I’ll ever be able to do it, and I think it might be. I can’t imagine another hotel will allow the level of shenanigans that the CHIN has put up with over the years. Since this might be it, I’ve allowed myself a significantly larger budget than usual and I’m planning to make the most of it.

Happy BreyerFest!

Do That Conga: Stone ISH, Part 4

It’s the Fourth of July, and while I wish this country were worth celebrating right now, at least it’s kinda cool that the fourth part of my ISH conga will be presented on the fourth? Today I’ll talk about the short-mane-long-tail version, which is arguably the most used of the non-custom bodies and also arguably my favorite.

 

 

I ordered this Design-A-Horse on January 3, 2020. Because of the pandemic, he took a full six months to get to me. [Ironic that that’s now become the minimum DAH wait time for Stone - and sometimes they take even longer. As of mid-June, there were still folks waiting on DAHs from last September!] 

Though I’m not usually a fan of loudly-patterned horses, I was perusing the albums one day on the Facebook DAH Colors & Patterns group and saw a mid-2010s extreme tobiano with a dark head and thought, wow, that looks really awesome. I am a person who prefers solid dark heads on both real and plastic horses - give me maybe a small star or a thin stripe and that’s about it. I especially like roans and duns, whose dark heads contrast with their lighter bodies.

Stone made a new extreme tobiano DAH pattern for 2019 and continued it into 2020, so I finally ordered one. In gloss, of course. Despite not being factory customized, he holds his own in the show ring against much fancier paint horses. His show name is Ibiza Bar.

 

 

This is #IS17022 Cutter, a regular run in 2002. I bought him in May 2023 from my friend Mandy and picked him up from her a couple months later at BreyerFest to save on shipping. He doesn’t show all that much, but when he does, I kept the name Mandy gave him - Cooper.

 

 

This lovely shaded flaxen thing is Bellame, the Quarter Horse Congress model in 2007. She came in both matte and glossy, and both have been on my want list for a long time. I purchased this matte gal from a seller in Australia in January 2024. Her show name is La Mia Bella, but she’s temporarily retired until I fix an eartip rub.

 

 

I never intended to buy this ISH, #9982 All I Can Bee, a dealer special run of 50 glossed models in 2002. Like, he wasn't on my radar at all. I was arranging to buy a few other ISHs from a seller in New York in early March 2024, and she tossed in a picture of All I Can Bee. He looked like a Shiny Bay Thing (though he’s actually dark chestnut) so I said sure, why not, and tossed him into my “cart” as well. He's rather pretty in gloss.

 

 

I talked about #9980 Lapis Lazuli back in my Winter Blues series - he was my last room sales purchase during BreyerFest 2025.

 

This ISH, #964 Bessie Girl Micia, a run of 200 from 2001, has a funny story.

Last July, not too long after we got back from BreyerFest, my friend Heather B. stumbled across a Facebook marketplace ad for a Breyer collection just a couple miles up the road from me. She messaged the seller and arranged to purchase all the Traditionals in the lot; there were a bunch of Classics as well, and I agreed to buy those. The seller sent grainy pictures of the horses as a large group, taken from mostly overhead. As such, it was not easy to tell what all of them were.

At the bottom of one of the pictures (so viewed almost completely from overhead) was a traditional-sized chestnut stock horse that Heather and I were stumped over. We were all over IDYB, trying to see what sculpt it could possibly be, and tossed around a whole bunch of ideas. An eternity (at least 10 minutes) later, finally, this happened:

Heather: I just can’t think of any trad that looks like that.
Me: Me neither. I’m totally stumped.
Heather: OH
Heather: IT’S AN ISH
Me: OMG
Me: REVOKE MY COLLECTOR’S LICENSE RIGHT NOW
Me: HOW COULD I NOT RECOGNIZE AN ISH

It was the only Stone in the entire collection, so I wasn't thinking about Stones, but with 29 ISHs in my collection, I definitely should have recognized it. Heather doesn't collect Stones, so I ended up with Bessie Girl Micia. She’s not in showable condition at the moment, but if I ever get her touched up, her show name will be Can't See for Lookin'.

There are 20 short-mane-long-tail ISHs on my wish list - with glossy Bellame at the top, of course.