This year we've lost the entire calendar of British Eventing fixtures, understandably cancelled til further notice. Of course this lack of competition is mostly a shame for the competitors themselves, but as a spectator I'm really missing getting out to a nice cross country course on a sunny (or not-so-sunny!) spring day to watch and photograph the horses in action.
At some of the bigger events, there's also the treat of finding my favourite trade stand, which is naturally the one which stocks Breyers. It's usually my first chance to see each batch of new releases in person, getting a good look at new moulds or seeing how paintjobs have worked out in the actual production runs when the stock photo can be a bit misleading, and picking out a model to take home is a highlight of the day. This year, with no eventing, there'll be no trade stand visits either, but a little while ago I'd noticed the same company, Equestrian Bookfair, had started listing models on Ebay, and at the end of March, I came up with a plan.
To recreate the annual habit of buying a Breyer at their trade stand each time, I'd place a big order in advance, take the very quickest of glances just to make sure I'd received the right things in the parcel, then tuck the models away still in their boxes, and on the date which I'd have visited each competition, get one out to open and add to my collection. This way I get to spread them out through the year in a satisfying way - while one huge parcel day would be fun, there's more anticipation in looking forward to several little ones, and it's closer to recreating my usual experience of gaining Breyers gradually through the season.
This weekend would've been the first opportunity to buy from the stall, and so I got out one of my set-aside models, and this is who I picked :
The gorgeous 2020 Sable Island Horse. A breed, and admittedly also a place, I didn't know about until the model was announced, but have read up on since (see, models are educational - I never would've known I didn't know unless Breyer had sparked the interest!).
She's my first of this Connemara Mare mould, having avoided the pale grey one as overly plain and a little too translucent-plastic-looking, but the dark colouring on this one really highlights all the fine features in the sculpting, there's a level of added detail which we only used to see on artist resins, with creases in the skin, veining, whisker bumps, and even eyelashes! I may be late to this connemara appreciation party but count me as a big fan, now!
Here's a couple more shots showing off her dramatic pose from different angles...
And here's one of her laying flat (or she could be rolling, though exactly where you'd stand to get this view of a real pony having a roll, I don't know - drone photography?!), this captures the depth of her shading. In person you can really see the red tones in her mane and tail, so she's either a very dark chestnut or a bay but with sunbleaching, I'm not sure which Breyer intended - the box info just says they come in 'solid dark colours' - but whether they designed her as a black chestnut or a bleached bay she's a lovely addition to my herd!
Unlike most of the other recent releases, they haven't given her a name, simply listing and labelling her by breed instead. I decided something suiting that Sable Island background would be nice, so spent a while looking for names on it's map, people from it's history, any native flowers or birds, all yielding nothing useful, but then happened across a map of shipwrecks around the island, and from there found a list of all the ships' names to read through. One name jumped out as there'd been two different ships of the same name foundered on the sandbanks, Stella Maris. The words and meaning ('star of the sea') sounded pleasant and fitting, and looking it up a little further, Stella Maris was used by sailors since the medieval era, as a name for 'a female protector or guiding spirit at sea', which seems just perfect for a remote island herd's protective lead mare.
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