Wish Granted

Well, my wishes paid off. I guess I owe my sister a lot. She entered the warhorse contest for me and won one. I didn't want to post on the main forums because I know a lot of people were disappointed they didn't get an email, and I didn't want to seem as if I was rubbing it in. So I'll post here, away from all the spotlight, where my closer online friends and faithful readers can share in my joy, as they wish.

He doesn't ship for a whole month, so there's no rush to choose a breed and pedigree him. I kind of want to see him in person first so I can let him speak to me. Since he was so vocal, just seeing a photo of him online, I'm sure he will be very, very loud in person.

I feel extremely lucky to claim one, as I know how limited they are, but he will be my first super limited edition model, and I doubt I'll be able to get another one for a very long time. (At least until I'm rich and can afford to bid in Breyerfest ;) ;) *cough* give me twenty years *cough*) I can also proudly say he will have a forever home here, and will not be going anywhere :)

I wish everyone the best for the year to come, and here's to more new ponies for everyone!

Creating Professional Certificates

How to Create Professional Breeding Certificates

There are many different things you should keep in mind while creating breeding certificates. I wanted to write an article to address as many of them as I could thing of, mainly because I realized I had the experience, knowledge, and good will to help and give advice to those people who either don’t know how, or who may realize their certificates don’t follow many of these guidelines.

Remember, as a model horse stable owner, you have the right to provide whatever type of certificate you desire, but if you wish to have repeat customers, you need to provide the type of service they expect. Part of this service is a reliable, presentable, and correct breeding certificate.

Format

Since I don’t have any experience with Macs, I’ll be discussing programs available on PCs. The best program to choose is the one you feel most comfortable with. There is no point having high expectations for your certificate but struggling for hours with a program you don’t understand.

Probably the most popular program is Microsoft Word. All of the new versions have a table option, which provides a very efficient and clean way to present the pedigree. Using the different types of font can result in a very nice, professional look. Tips: Use bold for headings, italics for special information, such as your email address, and normal text for the basic information.

Excel is an even more straightforward program for creating tables. You can use the line tool to underline the text in your pedigree and the merge cell option to put lines of text, such as descriptions, in.

Information

This is the most information that should be present somewhere on the page.

• The foal’s entire pedigree, anywhere from 4-6 generations complete
• The foal’s basic information
• Basic information on both parents (i.e. birth date, color, breed, gender, etc)
• Your contact information
• The name of your stable/ your logo

This information can be presented one of two ways, typically. You can fit it all onto one page, usually with the basic information at the top and the pedigree on the bottom, or as two separate pages, with the pedigree on one and the basic information on the other.

The Professionalism

Now, anyone can do the above things and still create a, shall we say it, crappy product. The professionalism comes through in the details. Follow these rules and I hope you can see the difference!

• If there are any “unknowns” in the pedigree, you better make sure you have extensively researched as much as you are able to make sure you can’t find the names that fit into that space. I received a certificate that had a real horse with a very distinct name with parents as unknown. One plug into allbreed and I was able to find the parents. That’s just lazy.
• Don’t assume allbreed is the dictionary. It is rife with misspellings, wrong parents, wrong dates, colors, etc. If it is a rare breed or not a popular horse, do research through real horse stable sites to double check information or find missing information. Make SURE your dates, colors, and parents are correct before you send it to a customer that may double check (and when the customer retypes the pedigree, normally they do check).
• Use spell check, check your grammar, read it over thrice, and check the print preview of the final product before you send it.
• Make sure your pedigree aligns within itself and there are no lines that drop down a second line, as this creates confusion. With all the tools available in word processing programs, there is no excuse to have a sloppy pedigree.

I hope this helps improve many of the pedigree certificates that get sent out!

A Long Wait

There's some horses that come into Golden Hart Estates that immediately get names, breeds, and a pedigree. And then there are others who have to wait weeks, months, or even years to be acknowledged. This guy is one of them.

He came into my life two Christmases ago, and has never gotten an identity. I hesitated to make him a mustang, because they are so hard to pedigree with real parents, or even with a full pedigree among model mustangs. Besides, mustangs are kind of the fall-back for any stocky horse that doesn't immediately scream Quarter Horse, or have any obvious markings to claim Appaloosa or Paint.

So he fell by the wayside and became *almost* forgotten.

Until today.

Before my quest over break, I would often visit "random" pages to see if I could match up any identities with bodies. But I found that I kept visiting the same random pages, and had a hard time finding the ones I was missing. Until I started going by alphabetical breed order a la my Excel worksheet. And tonight I got to Australian Stock Horse.

And Mr. Horse above, was the perfect choice for the identity of Thunderous Majesty. Quite a name for a horse that had once fallen by the wayside. It is a fitting end to a long wait.

Chasing Dreams

It is very rare that I see a model horse that I absolutely *have* to have. There are plenty I want, and want very bad, don't get me wrong, but now that I'm grown, that certain sparkle that surrounds models has grown limited to just a few.

And like a fool, I've fallen in love with War Horse. I don't have any certain feeling toward the mold itself, but the color, oh the color, is my absolute favorite shade of bay. I want him, desire him, and it'll crush my heart a little bit when I don't get him.

Because the bad news is, my family is horrible for luck when it comes to drawings. We've never won anything. I, personally, have never won anything, either.

However, my mind is healthy enough to deal with such losses, because my belief that everything happens for a reason consoles me that the people that got them needed them more. Which is a lie, for the most part. Some of the people that get them will not care for the model except for its monetary value, and turn around and sell it. Others will add it to a museum of dusty horses that never get one on one time, and still others will try to show it, and if it doesn't do well, toss it aside and replace it with the next new thing.

And I already know, and am quite happy with, the Christmas presents that are under the tree. My boyfriend is very supportive of my hobby, but he has no clue when it comes down to buying models, which ones I have or don't have, or don't even want. So this year he let me take some money and buy myself a few. I bought Isadora Cruce from the tack shop, and a few of the Stablemates I was missing (I'm on a ridiculous quest to collect them all *shakes fist at Pokemon*). And then, when we went to Murdochs later that evening, we saw they had a sale on all Breyer products for 20% off, so he hooked me up with the mid-states release and Kong.

And yet, Christmas morning, I will still be yearning for good news. Oh Santa, if you are out there, I have been so good this year!

The big 900!

I created an Excel file to list all my horses in a row. The rows are Name, Breed, YOB, FFC, LFC, Gender, Color, Brand, Size. It is really neat and handy because I can reorder the data according to Breed, or year of birth, or whichever I please.

That was how I found really quickly which horses were ending their breeding life this year, and which ones were starting in 2012.

I can also reorder by Breed, then Gender, then YOB, so I see all the breeds in alphabetical order, and within the breed I see mares first, and then oldest mare to youngest.

But the exciting news is that tonight, while adding in some of my orphans, I reached 900! Whoo hoo! It's inaccurate as to how many actual models I have, because I have a bunch of orphan models still, and some of the identities in my list are BSOs, and some models have multiple BSOs when an old one retires and the younger version of it takes over. But it's exciting to know I'm that close to 1000!

The horse that made it to 900 was Debutante, a chestnut tobiano American Saddlebred mare, on the Breyer ASB Little Bit mold. I matched her up to a name on a GC bio card, as parent to the GC Mini High Jinx, who I don't yet have.

 SFC Debutante

Named Crossbreeds (Serious)

In light of the more humorous post that came before this, I wanted to have a reference somewhere of all the named crossbreeds. I haven't, yet, found a comprehensive and reliable list online, but if anyone knows of one, please link it for me!!

Anglo-Arab(ian)= Arabian x Thoroughbred
Appendix Quarter Horse= Quarter Horse x Thoroughbred
Araloosa/Arapaloosa= Arabian x Appaloosa
Azteca= Andalusian x Quarter Horse/Criollo/Paint
Georgian Grande= American Saddlebred x Draft/Friesian
Irish Hunter= Irish Draught x Thoroughbred
Morab= Arabian x Morgan
Moriesian= Morgan x Friesian
National Show Horse= Arabian x American Saddlebred
Nez Perce= Appaloosa x Akhal Teke
Pintabian=Arabian x Paint, but only with 99% or greater Arabian blood
Quarab= Arabian x Quarter Horse
Tennuvian= Tennessee Walking Horse x Peruvian Horse
Walkaloosa= Appaloosa x gaited horse
Warlander= Andalusian x Friesian

Sporthorse typically implies the breed was crossed with a Thoroughbred or other sporting breed.

Named Crossbreeds (Funny)

In my quest to ID and pedigree all my orphans, I often play with the idea of choosing a named crossbreed to account for a model's strange color or models that just plain confuse me, such as the Breyer G4 Driving horse.

And last night, while browsing through unknown model horse stables (which typically suggests those owned by junior high or younger collectors), I found one that had a list of crossbreeds, and what to breed to get them. There was the Quarab, and the Morab, which were all fine and dandy, but then there were these:

Shetland Pony= Arabian x Miniature Horse
Hanoverian= Arabian x Clydesdale
Lipizzaner= Arabian x Lusitano
Spanish Barb= Arabian x Mustang
Morgan= Quarter Horse x Tennessee Walking Horse
Lusitano= Andalusian x Akhal Teke
Falabella= Andalusian x Miniature Horse

O.o

There were several others just as outlandish, but I didn't share the entire list on the forums in case the owner of the site read it and was offended/embarrassed. But how can I just let blatant misunderstanding be published for other young horse lovers to read? *sigh* I mostly wanted to share to let my friends giggle about it, but I didn't want to target anyone, especially a young, vulnerable girl. So, if she is, in fact, reading this, you can message me privately and I will help you out.

PS: According to the equations up there, a Lipizzaner would then be an Arabian-Andalusian-Akhal Teke mix. I don't know exactly what that would look like, but a Lipizzaner would not be it! Hehe

That is not for chewing...

My mother was craving a flea market run, so we went to our city's only flea market. By now I know all the regular horsey sellers, but today I found horses in two unexpected spots. One seller had their vintage horses priced at $20 and above, too high for my budget, and not in any of the molds I collect (yet...).

The other seller had one horse, who was flopped over on his side, and I only caught a glance of his feet. I picked him up, looked him over, and realized I didn't have any idea about his history. But, for only three dollars I snatched him up.

He's not even close to being mint. He's got rubs, some black marks that I haven't yet tried to wash off, but the worst damage is to his ears and the top of his head.  The ear closest to us in the photo is still pretty much there, but the opposite side is severely mangled. Basically, it looks like a dog got ahold of him for a minute or two.That dog needed some discipline!

I don't know much about woodgrain, just that they're sometimes hard to find. I would've rescued him for $3 no matter what color he was. But he is the first woodgrain I've owned, and I'm happy to add him to my collection!