And now for something completely different

I must start with a warning: this post is nothing to do with horses, real or model, or pedigrees, or anything related to them. My excuse for this? Well, firstly, on the blog profile it does say that I have been ‘recently extending my creative side to other media,’ and this seems as good a place as any for telling people about that. And secondly, I guess you have some right to know what I was spending all my time and energy on when it wasn’t horses or pedigrees!

In short, what I have been making is a steampunk-inspired necklace. I’m not sure how I initially heard of steampunk, but it was about a year ago, and I was quickly fascinated by the imagination, the cleverness and the wit which often seem to be displayed by the genre. My son was also interested and started to find out more about steampunk-inspired bands and performers, some of whom have become firm favourites of his.

Because of our enthusiasm, we made a point of visiting the steampunk exhibition put on by Bradford Industrial Museum earlier in the year. In the shop there I bought the book Steampunk Emporium by Emilly Ladybird (Jema Hewitt), and my imagination was really fired by the beautiful jewellery and trinkets featured in it. I had already started to experiment with making jewellery, and was inspired to try my own version of Emilly’s ‘Zeppelin Pirate Necklace.’

At this point I must hold my hand up and confess that I am really only a dabbler on the fringes of steampunk. I don’t read the literature which has largely inspired the movement, and I have only just started to attend events. In many ways I am probably guilty of the kind of band-wagon-jumping pilloried here, except that I’m doing it out of a genuine love for the look, rather than to make money. However, one of the things I have gathered, particularly from Emilly’s book, is that steampunk is all about the story: the alter-ego one invents, and how one’s attire and gadgets reflect that character and their story.

As someone who can waste many a happy hour browsing crypto-zoological sites on the internet, I quickly decided that my perfect persona would be an eccentric Victorian lady of independent means, who uses her fortune to travel the world looking for evidence of rare and legendary creatures. I christened this character Lady Antonia Gryphon (I’ve always wanted to be called Antonia; I don’t know why), and started planning an adaptation of the pirate necklace, this one to be instead a record of Lady Antonia’s trip to Tibet in search of the Abominable Snowman or Yeti. After a lot of shopping and three sessions of actual making, this necklace was the result.

 

Tibet lies between India and China, and so the necklace features both Chinese coins (on the two outermost drops) and an Indian bead (on the central drop), as well as Tibetan turquoise beads. The silver charm with red beads hanging from it is a miniature version of a Tibetan Buddhist prayer box called a ghau, and was given to Lady Antonia by the monks of the remote monastery where she lodged and learned the secrets of the yeti’s whereabouts. On the opposite drop can be seen a silver model of the trusty yak which carried Lady Antonia on her adventures! The centrepiece of the necklace is a locket which when opened reveals a lock of yeti hair – Lady Antonia’s prized proof of the creature’s existence.

In reality, the components of the necklace came from a number of sources. The vast majority of them were bought on eBay, mostly from shops specialising in jewellery findings, but some second-hand from people genuinely having a clear out (the Indian bead and the ghau, which was originally part of a bracelet, both fall in the latter category). The coins, which were also bought on eBay, are genuinely antique and Chinese; I was delighted to find out that one of them is pre-1800. The yak is, upon close inspection, more like an American bison, but it was being sold as a yak so I’m sticking with that! The larger gear is, I think, made and sold just for crafters, but the smaller ones and the silver half-moons are genuine watch parts, again sold as bundles by weight on eBay. The yeti hair is actually from a Highland cow – in fact, not just any old Highland cow, but a celebrity one who has a range of merchandise and his own Facebook page.

Here you can see the necklace as worn on my first steampunk night out. Sadly it does not totally work in wear, as most of the dangles are too long and end up getting entangled in the top of my corset. This, coupled with the extremely thin wire I had to use to go through the tiny holes in the half-moons, meant that the ghau and the yak both became detached during the evening; however, I was able to rescue them both, so they can be re-attached when I get round to it.

I now have plans for several more jewellery pieces, and other accessories for this outfit such as a chatelaine and a hat, so you may well be reading about those in the future.

Making a scene

In the last post I promised you a look at how some of the projects I was working on turned out. Well, only one is finished, and ironically that’s the one with the least Milliput involved, but here are some pictures to show you what I was working on.

It’s a strange fact that most of my favourite British horse and pony breeds are rare and to some extent endangered, and because of this, I have for years been aware of the work of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust. Several years ago I had the idea of creating a scene which illustrated an RBST Stand at a county show, but I’d never got round to it. However, the Scene class at A Show Of Two Halves (ASOTH) held last month provided a catalyst for me to get on and do it.

Here you can see the scene as it eventually ended up at the show. The base is a piece of hardboard covered with railway grass (the sort that comes as a sheet, not the scatter). The animals and people are all Britains or similar makes, and most of them date from my childhood forty years ago. The two equine representatives were already painted up as part of my collection, but the rest of the animals I repainted as specific rare breeds for this scene.

The metal hurdle-type fences are also vintage Britains, bought on eBay with this scene in mind, but the mesh stock fencing is modern, part of a range now produced to complement Britains farm pieces, and again available on eBay.

The Milliput in question was used on the human figures in the scene. The lady behind the information desk is Britains, but she was originally wearing overalls and carrying a tray of some sort. I used Milliput to fill in a hole in her belly and give her a smart dress instead of overalls. The other two figures, picked up separately at car boot sales and the like, I think started life as some sort of firefighter figures. The man nearest the camera needed no work but a repaint, but the figure approaching the desk has had a sex change! To begin with it was a male carrying something really obviously inappropriate like a fireman’s axe; I managed to remove most of this but left a lump which I decided could pass for a handbag, so it seemed sensible to make her a woman! Cue long hair and an addition to her chest area: in actual fact, in comparison with the other figures she is much smaller and should probably go as a child or young teenager, so I may have overdone her chest a bit! Shall we say she is well-developed for her age… why else do you think she is facing away from the camera?

My favourite part of the scene is the information desk itself, with tiny posters and booklets on it, and the posters on each pen identifying the breeds. I spent quite a while researching these on the internet and shrinking them to tiny sizes to print out.

The scene attracted plenty of attention at the show, as I had hoped it would, being something novel and a bit different. I was delighted when it won the Scene class and then went on to be chosen as Performance Champion! Look out for it at a few more shows next year.

Milliput milestone

This morning I got my Milliput out again. This is indeed a milestone, because it's been so long that I honestly cannot remember when I used it last.

The catalyst was the approach of A Show of Two Halves in September - a live show where the first day is entirely given over to performance classes. Performance is not really a strong point of mine, but for a long time I have been planning a scene, and I'd really like to get it finished for this show if possible. To do this, I needed to make a few minor alterations to some Britains people, and so the Milliput was needed.

I always find that I end up with more mixed Milliput than I need, and this morning I deliberately mixed quite a generous amount, as there were various other projects hanging round in which I knew could use it. Mostly these were resins or customs on which I want to build up various areas before painting them, and there was also a sculpted base for a model which has been waiting for quite some time.

Luckily I found that I had a unopened packet of Milliput, although because it was a couple of years old, the sticks of epoxy had gone rather hard round the edges. I therefore trimmed all the hard areas off with a sharp kitchen knife and discarded them. Bitter experience has taught me that if you try to incorporate them into the mix, you just end up with unmixed hard flecks which can later fall out and spoil your sculpted area.

This morning also marked the first time I had actually used purpose-made sculpting tools. I bought a set of them several years ago, but they had sat unused until now. They are double-ended stainless steel tools bearing a strong resemblance to the things that dentists use to poke your gums, and the pack I have is labelled 'Wax Carver'. I bought them from Horsing Around, but I don't know if they are British or American in origin.

Prior to this, my only sculpting tools have been my fingers and sometimes a cocktail stick for small details, but I found these tools extremely helpful. Wet fingertips are still very good at smoothing a Milliput surface, but the flat-end tools were also good for doing this in areas which I couldn't reach with my fingers. As I chiefly work with Stablemate scale, there are quite a lot of those - between the forelegs, for example - and having the tools was a real help. Also, as the Milliput dried out during the session, it became more and more prone to sticking to my fingers instead of the model, and applying it with a tool helped to solve this problem.

I was mostly using the tools for smoothing rather than actually sculpting detail, but I'm sure that over time I will be using more of their capabilities.

The only difficulty I encountered was really caused by my own impatience - I always want to make as much progress on a model as possible, which often means applying Milliput in several different areas. For example, on one mini resin I was wanting to deepen the girth and build up the belly, chest and upper legs, while on a Heredities model I was working on the neck, chest, belly and hindquarters. The problem was that several times I found myself marking or displacing an area I had just worked on, while I held the model to work on another area. Frustratingly, I then had to go back and repair the earlier work. I did manage to get quite a lot done, but I think that with all these horses, further sessions will be needed. Luckily the changes needed to the Britains people were quite simple, and so once dry, they will be ready for sanding and painting.

This is just a quick post without pictures, I'm afraid, as I am having an exceptionally busy summer and just don't have the time at the moment. However, I'll be showing you pictures of all these projects as they come to completion.

Pedigreeing my Shetlands - Part I

It’s a sad fact that, because I’ve been doing pedigree assignment so long, I usually have to preface any posts on a new breed with a long rambling backstory, explaining how and why I got to where I am with that breed. Perhaps I should just cut that part out, but on the whole I feel it’s useful to keep it there, as it does help to highlight some of the sources available and maybe even to help others to profit from my mistakes. To keep the posts of reasonable length, however, this one is the backstory, and the up-to-date part will come later.

Well, back in 1991, I went to a car-boot-type sale in a disused mill near where I was then living, in Bolton, and I managed to pick up a Beswick Shetland stallion “Eschonchan Ronay”, from the Native Breeds series, for £10. Even in those days that was quite a bargain, and I was well pleased.

This was well before the days of the internet, and I didn’t have a lot of reference material on Shetlands. What I had was the catalogue from the Ponies of Britain national show at Peterborough from when I had been there in 1987. The choice of parents in there was somewhat limited, and at the time it seemed that the safest thing to do was make him a full brother to one of the yearlings in the catalogue, a black colt called Linacre Duncan, by Minto of Drakelaw out of Chatsworth Diana.  I named my stallion Linacre Butch Cassidy, being a fan of the film, which happened to be on TV the day I bought him.

In the mid-1990s I was given a couple of old Shetland Pony Stud Book Society magazines from 1989 and 1990. These were packed with articles and stud adverts, and thus were a mine of useful pedigree assignment information. I read them assiduously and made copious notes, even to the extent of taking them into the labour room with me while I was having my second son! I made my poor husband write notes for me as the contractions got stronger… I don’t think I ever used the notes in the end, but it probably worked as a good distraction technique for both of us!

Anyway, something I learned from the magazines was that the real Shetland world in Britain seemed to be largely split into two camps: those who bred standard Shetlands, ranging from 34 inches up to the maximum of 42 inches, and those who bred miniature Shetlands, which had to be under 34 inches at adulthood. What’s more, the standard Shetlands were overwhelmingly black, with most breeders actively disliking any other colour, while the miniature Shetlands were an array of colours, several breeders specialising in particular colours such as chestnuts, palominos, or tobianos. I don’t know if this divide is still as apparent in the Shetland world now, but in the 1980s that certainly seemed to be the case. Shows were even divided into ‘black’ and ‘coloured’ classes, ‘coloured’ in this instance meaning not pinto, as it often does in the UK, but simply ‘anything that’s not black’!

In the meantime I had also read a book which paid particular attention to the growth of interest in miniature Shetlands from the 1960s onwards, and was generally quite negative about them. The point made was that while some miniature Shetlands are just naturally small, but have good conformation and the sturdiness of their breed, others are the product of a genetic defect known as neoteny/neotenism. Animals with this condition retain juvenile characteristics into adulthood: in ponies this leads to small size, but also features such as weak backs and hind legs.  Since many miniature ponies were only wanted as pets, and since humans have a natural predilection to find juvenile characteristics attractive or ‘cute’, neoteny had become quite widespread in some miniature lines. The book argued, convincingly in my opinion, that breeding ponies with a genetic defect that made them ornaments only and not suitable for work must be to the long-term detriment of the breed.

I didn’t like the look of the neotenic ponies at all, and I wanted to breed or be associated with ponies which were big and strong enough to do a job of work. However, I found the ubiquitousness of black ponies among the standard Shetlands rather boring. I therefore decided to be contrary, and try to pedigree my models as standard-size Shetlands which were not black. Fortunately such ponies, although in the minority, did and do exist, and the magazines contained enough material on them to get me started.

The insistence of many breeders on black ponies got my alarm bells ringing, and I took another look at Linacre Butch Cassidy, becoming uncomfortable with the fact that I had a bay stallion from two black parents. Although his sire was listed as the sire of a brown colt in the show catalogue, I suspected that this might be a literal description of his foal coat, rather than his genetic colour, and that this cross was in fact unlikely to produce brown or bay. I didn’t want to change Butch’s dam, because dams are harder to find and because this would have necessitated changing his prefix, so in the end I looked for a different sire. I chose a bay pony called Eastlands Lightning; he and his sire Lakeland Lightning featured a lot in the magazines as ponies that did performance not just showing, so I figured they were much more the type I was looking for.

In about 1993, I got another Shetland: a Northlight. At the time, they were doing ‘factory special orders’ where you could get a model painted to your own specifications. I though blue roan would be a good colour – regular readers will know that I’ve always loved roans. I made this one a mare so that I had the nucleus of a breeding stud.

Information in my Shetland Society magazines allowed me to single out a stud which bred standard size blue roans, but to actually to choose parents for this mare, I had to buy a stud-book. The Shetland stud books are quite useful publications; they only cover one year, but then again there are a lot of Shetland foals born every year, so they include a lot of individuals. In addition they list all the mares producing their first foals that year, listing sire, dam and grand-dam for them; and also stallions licensed that year, for whom the dam line is listed to five generations. However, if you are going to spend money, I actually recommend buying not a single year’s book but one or more of the Stud Book Index volumes, of which more next time.

Anyway, armed with my stud book, I was able to find parents for my mare: she became Clothie Mathilda, foaled 1988 by Hesup of Transy out of Clothie Jobelle. Interestingly, when I did later get an index volume I learned that this dam line comes from an upgrading/ inspection scheme such as many of our native breeds have had over the years.

I no longer have Mathilda’s ‘body’ – I was never totally happy with the Northlight Shetland and eventually decided it was time for her to move on – but I have retained her details. So far only one of the progeny of these two foundation ponies has found a body, and here she is:

This is Clifton Malteser, a Renaissance Resinry model from the US, with whom I am very pleased.

Next time I’ll tell you more about how my Shetland stud expanded. I don’t quite know when next time will be, because at the moment I seem to have so many more creative things I want to do (blogging being one of them) than I have time or opportunity. I do find this frustrating and I imagine as blog followers you do too... all I can say is, I do my best and hope for better.

European excellence

Oh dear, posts this year are proving even more erratic than last. I won't bore you with the full list of excuses, but one is that I was organising a live show, which was held in April. Having held a show for British breeds last year, this year I thought we would go for European breeds.

There was a wide range of In Hand classes catering for all European breeds and for many makes of model. However, as usual, I was most impressed by the quality and ingenuity of the performance entries on display. So I thought I would share a few of them with you here.

Here's a lovely Akhal-Teke costume entry by Suna Akiah:

while here's a medieval French knight by Ann-Marie Potrell:

This Spanish lady by Laura Ibbitt was Reserve to Reserve Ridden Champion:

and here are two lovely Spanish Riding School entries, by Catriona Burt and Lynne Howberry-Gale respectively:

This really cute milk-float turnout was by Suna Akiah:

and lastly, Lynne Howberry-Gale's dressage entry, MHEC Danzig, was the Performance Champion:

I've got a little list

As you can see from the photo above, there’s been a bit of painting going on here recently, majoring on chestnut-and-white.  All these horses went through the usual phase in the middle of painting when I wasn’t happy with them, but eventually I was pretty pleased with how they turned out.

I paint by hand using artist’s acrylics, and I’m indebted to Marion Keefe for a recommendation that she made to me many moons ago, namely, a stay-wet palette. This basically consists of a shallow plastic tray, into which you place a sheet of absorbent paper (like blotting paper) which you soak in water. On top of this you place a sheet of greaseproof/baking parchment-like paper, and this is what you mix your paints on. A lid fits over the top. What happens is that the paint on top gradually absorbs the water through the sheet, meaning that it does not dry out in a few hours as acrylic paint usually does. As long as you keep the absorbent paper wet, and replace the lid when you’re not using the palette (to minimise evaporation), both the blobs of unmixed paint and even the areas of mix will stay wet and usable for days and even weeks. You can buy the palettes and dedicated paper fairly reasonably at art shops, although upon Googling, I see that you could also make your own.

For someone like me, who has to fit painting in around work, family life and many other commitments, this is absolutely invaluable. No wasted paint, no time spent faffing about mixing and trying to rematch colour shades at the beginning of every painting session. I don’t know where I’d be without it. A word of warning though: at the end of several weeks’ (intermittent) work on this latest batch of horses, my palette looked like this:

Yes folks, that’s mould growing on the paint:

In fact towards the end, there was quite a whiff of mould whenever I took the lid of and I dread to think how many spores I inhaled, so take heed: it’s probably not a good idea to leave the palette for so long that it gets to this stage ;-)

Anyway, to drag us back vaguely nearer to the topic: do you make lists? I’m an inveterate list-maker, and back in 2001 I drew up one particular list which I’m still using. It’s a product of something which I and many others used to do in the hobby, particularly in the 1970s and 80s: ‘breeding’ horses in real time. Each year I would write down a list of which mares were being sent to which stallions, and the next year I would duly write down details of the resulting foal. This was nearly as satisfying as breeding living animals, with the added bonus that you always got to choose the foal’s colour and gender, with no disappointing surprises!

The downside, if such it was, was that one’s enthusiasm for breeding generally ran way ahead of one’s pocket for buying models, and so one ended up with a long list of ‘Details Only’ paper horses waiting for a body. It was these that I listed for myself in 2001, and perhaps alarmingly, I’m still working through that list today.

At the time I listed 14 horses; over the next few years I added 13 more. On my list I have a column for what body I had in mind for each horse, followed by a column to tick when that body was acquired, and then if it required customising, columns to record that it had been prepped, undercoated, and finally completed. I know all this smacks of OCD, but I think if I had that I’d have finished a few more horses over the years. Rather, I think it reflects the fact that I like to be able to tick things off as a ‘reward’ whenever I’ve got a step further in anything!

Over time I have sometimes regarded this list with depression, thinking about my slow progress on it, but a recent inspection revealed that slowly but surely, the bodies are getting ticked off. In some cases I have abandoned the idea of a customised body when a suitable OF came along – Breyer releasing a Cleveland Bay, for example, saved me an awful lot of work! And at this point, I have decided to write off the oldest few horses on the list – some of them were in their teens even when I made the list, and there doesn’t seem a lot of point in creating a body for a set of details which is now in its mid-twenties! I will still retain these details, but where I had bodies lined up for them, I will most likely make them into offspring of those details – the next generation down, so that they can hit the showring at a believable age.

The reason I’m telling you all this is that the jumper in the picture is of one of the horses on the list: Flying Fox, a warmblood/TB cross foaled in 2001. At last I was able to add another tick and mark off another horse as completed! That being the case, there only remain 5 or 6 horses for whom I still aim to provide bodies.

The trouble, of course, is that this list represents only the tip of the iceberg. It is by no means the sum total of the bodies that I have to customise; there are many more, packed away in the attic or in boxes under the trolley which I grandly call my workbench:  models which I have bought over the years with an idea of what I want them to be. But because in those cases the body, rather than the details, came first, they are not on my list. Hmm. Perhaps I should make a separate list of those some time…

A new departure - Welsh arrivals!

Well, dear readers, it was my firm intention at the start of this year to write at least one blog post every month. Now that, even with the extra day in February, I’ve still failed at that one, let’s see what we can do…

I’ve never been particularly into Welsh ponies or cobs. Not that I ever had anything against them, you understand – on the contrary, I respect them as attractive, sound, eminently useful equines. I just never really got into collecting Welsh models – I preferred to concentrate on some of the rarer British natives, such as my ‘local’ pony, the Dales. The Welsh always seemed to have plenty of support without needing mine; indeed, the Welsh classes seemed so competitive that I was never particularly tempted to join in. With no Welsh models to speak of, I had no need to research Welsh pedigrees, and though I read a couple of Dr Wynn Davies’ books, I tended to retreat after a while with my head spinning due to the numerous variations on Trotting Comet, Young Trotting Comet, Old Briton, Young Briton, Trotting Briton, Flying Comet, Trotting Railway and so on. However, the past couple of years have seen something of a departure for me, and I now own a number of Welsh Cob models.

This change can be traced, I think, to two things. Firstly, my friend, fellow hobbyist and pedigree enthusiast Helen Cooke died. Welsh, particularly Cobs, were Helen’s first and enduring love, and during her last few months she was writing an article about her model Welsh stud for my club newsletter. I was entrusted with the task of typing up this hand-written, unfinished piece after she died, which meant quite a lot of reference back to lists of Helen’s models to make sure I was interpreting her abbreviated notes correctly. It was a pleasure and an honour to do it, but also it helped me to share something of Helen’s love and enthusiasm for her Cobs. I ended by feeling it would be a shame if some at least of her model bloodlines were not carried on.

Secondly, the following Christmas, I received this little mare as a gift from my BOPAR Secret Santa that year, Sam Helton:

I felt that she would make a reasonable Welsh Cob – certainly as good as any other OF plastics available. Indeed, I got so enthusiastic that I enlisted another friend, Carra McClelland, to look out in the USA for two more colourways on this mould, with the idea that I could make them into three generations of mares. The prospect of having an instant entry for the Dam Produce and Breeding Family classes in BOPAR shows was also a contributing factor!

Carra was very efficient in sourcing the models and in due course these two arrived:

In the meantime I’d also been having an online chat with another friend, colour authority Lesli Kathman, asking her about pedigrees for roan Welsh Cobs. I hadn’t realised that true roan is quite a rare colour in Cobs, many of the horses described as roan really just carrying roaning from the sabino and/or rabicano patterns. Lesli however pointed me to this site, and via that to the home website of the Balnecroft Stud, where most of the surviving true roan Cobs can be found.

As at the time, neither of these sources showed information on younger roan ponies (they have since been updated), I decided that the roan mare should be the oldest and the grandmother of my group. As her parents I chose the chestnut roan stallion Balnecroft Red Shadow and the liver chestnut mare Balnecroft Telyn. The model’s name is Balnecroft Gloriana and she has at least two real full siblings. I made her foaled in 1995, and had a momentary panic when researching this blog as I went back to the updated stud site and read that her sire had been gelded. However, All Breed Pedigree lists four of his offspring foaled after 1995, so I seem to be OK.

I wanted the chestnut mare to be her daughter, so I needed a sire likely to produce chestnut, preferably a model one. Bernadette O’Neill is well known as a fan and breeder of Welsh Cobs in the British model hobby, so I asked if she had anything suitable, and she suggested her palomino stallion Brynog Rhodri. His sire is Bernadette’s Llanarth Nebulous (Robin Hood (r) x Llanarth Rhoswen (r)) and his dam is Brambridge Cariad, who is a portrait model of Bernadette’s real mare of the same name, and has always been a favourite of mine. I was delighted to accept Rhodri as the sire for the chestnut mare, whom I called Clifton Firebird.

The youngest mare, Firebird’s daughter, is called Clifton Felicity and I already had a sire lined up for her, since while all this was going on I had succumbed to temptation and acquired this handsome fellow:

He is a Laura Behning ‘Cardiff’ resin painted by Molly Pengra of the USA, and his name is Llewellyn, although as yet he doesn’t have a prefix or a pedigree. Watch out here for a further post when I get him sorted out.

There is, however, an unexpected and exciting post-script to this story. A couple of years after Helen’s death, her mother Ann offered me another of her horses. Many people will remember PR Penrhyn Golden Arrow, a BFA customised by Margaret Hallam – he was Helen’s pride and joy, and probably her most successful model. Ann had kept him for a while, but after reading an article of mine on how models can be ‘reincarnated’ as their sons or daughters, she asked me to take Golden Arrow and do the same with him. She wanted him to have a ‘forever home’ where he would be shown, as a son of Golden Arrow, and asked me to use either ‘Golden’ or ‘Arrow’ as part of his name.

Naturally I was honoured and delighted to do this, and almost immediately his name and pedigree came to me. What better than to make him by Golden Arrow out of my mare Firebird, and to call him Golden Phoenix, as with this new identity he is metaphorically ‘rising from the ashes’? I’m sure you’ll see him around at the shows and I hope that he continues to do as well as he always did.

Thus, then, my little Welsh cob herd is doing well, and I’m sure will feature again here in future.