My New Adventure: Breyer Horses

   Since I sold both my horses (wow that was fast), but I am not ready to not be a "horse person" (that's just not going to happen), I decided to make an attempt at Model Horses.  Now, I was never a kid who collected Breyers.  Somewhere (still searching for them) I have three Breyers from my youth.  I found out last summer that you can SHOW model horses.  Somehow I had missed that memo.
   I met a lady who shows Breyers and have been learning more about showing them and re-painting them.  She is hosting a show in August and I bought a model in the out of the box classes and I'm working on a few customs to show in the custom classes.  I will document my progress here!

    So far, I have a model I'm working on at Shana's house, the lady helping me learn everything, and three more I'm working on at home.  All of them are Stablemates.

    I collected the tools Shana recommended.  I picked a couple bodies from my box of NOT LSQ Stablemates and then I used an exact-o-knife to scrape off seams, carve out ears, and carve frogs into their teeny-tiny feet.  That nearly gave me carpel tunnel, but the precision and repetitiveness appealed to my perfectionism.

   Next, I sanded the bodies till I couldn't feel seams or knife marks.  Yesterday, I got ready to paint them with the primer.  Disaster!  I used the same paint that I used at Shana's, but the stuff came out in too big of drops instead of a mist, got everywhere, dripped from the can, and dried in tiny bubbles on the horses!  I was soo frustrated!  Only one came out well enough to not start over.  Talk about discouraging!  Norman went to the store to try a different primer and returned with a different brand.

    Today, I sanded the bubbles off the bodies and realized I hadn't gotten frogs carved on one, so I did that. Finally, I was ready to re-primer them.  The new primer covered much better and other than a grass bug landing on the rump of the 2nd one and causing a minor tragedy it seemed to work better.  The downside is that it claims to take 24 hrs to fully dry completely.  But, I got the two bodies re-painted and they're drying.  I think the primer will actually dry much faster on the horses because they're small and the paint doesn't need to be very thick.

   When I get the energy, pictures of the "before" bodies will be up!