Singles Bar: The Letter E

There are no Classics, Paddock Pals, Stablemates, or Mini Whinnie molds starting with E, and there are only five Traditional Breyer molds: horse molds El Pastor, Esprit, and Ethereal, and animal molds Elephant and Elk. I don’t collect any animal molds except the Cow, and I have more than one El Pastor and Ethereal, so my lone Esprit gets the spotlight this month all by himself.

 

 

This is #760520 Lionheart, a Brick-and-Mortar/Flagship store special run in 2012. He is one of only two hobby trades I’ve done outside of my immediate friend group. A fellow hobbyist with whom I had done a transaction in the past posted an ISO ad on Model Horse Sales Pages in early December 2012, looking for a matte Sixes and Sevens from BreyerFest and offering a Lionheart in trade. I got both a matte and a glossy Sixes and Sevens from the tent line that year, so I was immediately interested. Sixes and Sevens was much more limited in quantity, but Lionheart was an extremely popular release (so popular that I was unable to secure one from any of my local dealers; all had already been reserved) so I didn’t feel the trade was lopsided. I love his color and am super happy to have worked out the trade for him.

I have a few Esprits on my wish list. The glossy dun pinto Samba Surprise (149 made) and Steppin’ Out (200 made) will be the easiest and cheapest to obtain. Faded Love (96 made) will be a lot more expensive. Unobtainiums include the chestnut WEG SR (250 made but not all were released to hobbyists so they can be hard to find) and the glossy silver bay from the WEG Diorama contest (25 made). A friend of mine has the WEG glossy silver bay and he is insanely gorgeous. I will never be able to afford one, but he’s by far my favorite release on the mold.

Though I’ve never wanted one - ever - I do have a fun Prince of Chintz story. Prince of Chintz was the BreyerFest 2012 decorator model on the Esprit mold, and he looks like this (photo courtesy of Identify Your Breyer):

 

 

I was asked to volunteer with the BreyerFest Children & Youth Show for the first time in 2016 as the results person. I’ve got a crazy-ass spreadsheet that I’ve customized to there and back, complete with nested IF formulas to populate entrant names based on their entrant number and conditional formatting and VLOOKUPs across sheets to highlight models shown in multiple classes (which is prohibited at the BreyerFest shows). It’s a thing of beauty and it allows me to get the results done for both shows by the end of the day (and sometimes, as long as I don’t get stupid and add rows incorrectly and screw up the VLOOKUPs, I have them done by the end of the show).

In addition to getting to nerd out with Excel, one of my favorite parts of the C&Y Show is getting to see all the fun names kids come up with for their models. There have been some really great ones over the years, but in the 2019 Youth show, in the Unrealistic Colors & Patterns class, the 10th place horse was a Prince of Chintz, who had the best name out of any I’ve seen before or since:

Grandma’s Wallpaper.

I laughed out loud, loudly.