Yuletide Challenge : Holiday Lights

First Post of the Day

This prompt falls on the second day of Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights. (Happy Hanukkah to all who are celebrating it!) The prompt calls for Holiday Lights: Lamp or Night Light. 

Never have I come across a Breyer lamp or night light while out thrifting. The ones I've seen at BreyerFest and other hobby gatherings have had price points that I was not interested in paying. So, there have been none in my collection since I started collecting.

More recently, though, the Breyer Vintage Club offered a night light, Kirk.

He is a stunning glossy spatter dapple grey and on a mold I really like.

I lit him up once just to be sure everything worked and then removed the cord and set him on the shelf for display. I really like him.

Just for fun, here are some holiday lights from last year.

Our tree and mantle taken from the upstairs overlook.

The dining room windows have some nighttime twinkle, too.

Sometimes we are fortunate enough to see the Northern Lights from our own back yard.

And, of course, I can't leave out a favorite - Friday Night Lights!

Don't forget the December give away! Comment on any post between Sunday, December 14 and Tuesday, December 16 at 11:59 PM Eastern. I'll spin to win Wednesday and pop the embroidered Clydesdale towel in the mail Wednesday morning!

Stay 'tooned!

Vintage Club Kirk & His Insert

For weeks, the box containing Kirk, the most recent Vintage Club offering, has been sitting on my desk. I've wanted to open that box, but I needed time to take photos of him, to get him tagged, and then to find a space for him on my shelves. 

Finally, I got that time.

Aside from a small bent corner, the shipping box looked okay.

Kirk's inner box looked fine until I looked at the top of it.

Oh, no. The ears had come through it. 

Sure enough, despite being bubble wrapped,

Kirk's near ear had poked through the bubble wrap and then the box - twice. Fortunately though there were no rubs on that ear and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Kirk is absolutely gorgeous. He's a glossy splatter grey, a highly popular vintage color that is very well executed on this piece.

He has a striped mane and tail and my piece is flawless.

Kirk is also a throwback to the 1950s night lights and has a jack in his belly where he can be connected to a power source.

The removable power cord is quite long enabling him to be placed a good distance away from the plug.

Kirk is rapidly becoming one of my favorite Vintage Club pieces of all.

Anyone else catch this error on Kirk's certificate of authenticity? When I read that, I thought that that was a really odd way to describe his color. In fact, it made no sense. Something was wrong.

I compared the certificate to a screen shot I'd taken of his description when he was released.

Yep! ICONIC is the word Breyer meant, not chaotic. Makes MUCH more sense!

Informational inserts always come with Vintage Club pieces, and Andrea Gurdon used to write them. I've wondered who would do them after she passed away, or if perhaps we were lucky and she'd completed the 2024 inserts before she had. I'm not sure that she did, though.

This insert did not seem like her writing, but I can't put my finger on why - it just doesn't "feel" like Andrea. I've read her blog for years, I've read all of her Vintage Club inserts, and I read her Morning Glory Ranch Sampler every year it was published. I'm very familiar with her writing style and lean toward thinking that she may not have written Kirk's insert.

But, I may be wrong and she did write this one, too.

Please don't misunderstand - there is absolutely nothing wrong with this insert; it's fine. It's just that the writing style doesn't have the familiarity for me that Andrea's did. 

A part of me hopes that this insert is one last bit of Andrea's knowledge being shared with the rest of us. Wouldn't that would be lovely?

If you know who write Kirk's insert, please email me at horsiemama8@gmail.com or make a comment below. I'm curious and I suspect I am not alone in wondering.

Thanks.

The News Keeps Coming!

I  spent many hours the past two days researching and writing today's blog post about my guess for this year's BreyerFest Mystery Horse Surprise. It's ready to go and was scheduled to post this morning. 

And then two big news items from Breyer dropped yesterday and took precedence.

First, Vintage Club Kirk is available!

He is on the Geronimo mold (one of my favorite new molds) in a vintage glossy splatter dapple grey and he's a nightlight. Even better, the plug in his belly can be removed if you want to use him in your show string for a halter horse or some other reason.

Vintage Club collectors have two weeks to order Kirk, but I did not wait - he's already ordered. But ordering was problematic.  

I was asked to verify that I was not a robot and to click all the buses in the tile square. But there were no buses. Not a one. There were a lot of RVs, three in fact, so I thought that might be what I was being asked to click and so I did. 

I got a message to click ALL the buses, and the tile photos changed. Still no buses.

I clicked the refresh button and two school buses popped up. I clicked those and yet again got the "click ALL the buses" message. This led to several refreshes, clicking more random school buses, and being told I needed to click on them all despite the fact that I just had.

Finally I decided to start over and went to click the log-in button again. But when I did, my account popped up instead of the log-in page. Somehow, I had been logged in while the tile square had remained present and still asking for image clicks. 

This is the first time I have ordered anything directly from Breyer since the new web site went live. Is there a glitch in the log-in process now? Or maybe the first time an account is logged into?  Time will tell.

And second...

Emails went out to those who are attending BreyerFest in person and since I have an All-Access ticket, I got one of those emails.

In that email, we were told which two models we had been selected for and could pick up at BreyerFest. I got my top two choices!

 Better than Revenge

Can't Hold Us Down.

I'm really happy about that! The Mystery Horse Surprise is my third pick and then, aside from the Quagga, I am not interested in the others. In other offerings, I do hope to get Fortitude (this year's crystal) and, if I like the mold, the Mystery Horse Surprise.

But after all the research I have been doing on this year's Mystery Surprise, I think I might be okay with not getting one, especially if the model is a Moody mold as rumored. And I like Moody Molds. It's just that it doesn't look as though the Moody molds I'd like to add to my collection are in the running for the Mystery Horse Surprise.

If the rumors are incorrect and it is not a Moody sculpt, then I may need to look on the secondary market for one. Usually the Mystery Horse models are not hard to find although the price point for those may count me out.

Tomorrow I will share that post about my guess for the Mystery Model. It was a lot of work to research it all, but I hope you find it worth the read.

Stay 'tooned!

Say What, Breyer??

Sometimes it is really hard to keep up with Breyer. Not that I am complaining. Not at all. I love all the offerings they have, from models to pins, to plushies and ornaments and Club releases... I struggle to keep up sometimes!

Yesterday the first photo of a release for the 2024 Vintage Club dropped and my jaw dropped in return. I did not see this coming.

 It's a nightlight, folks! On the Geronimo mold in a vintage splatter dapple color!

In retrospect, maybe I should not have been surprised. 

We got Rustler (a music box) in this year's Club offerings. And in 2020?

Trailblazer, the Western Horse with a vintage grooming kit was a Vintage Club release. (Photos of Rustler and Trailblazer from Identify Your Breyer.)

Two pieces in 2017 also forshadowed where Breyer might be going with its Club offerings.

Blossom and Belle came with matching blue blankets, mimicking the green blankets of the 1969 Clydesdale Mare and Foal set,

and Quinn harked back to the 1984 Proud Arabian Mare who came with a similar halter and lead rope. (Photos from Identify Your Breyer.)

Oh, and don't forget Cooper in 2022, who was a nod to the Appaloosa Performance Horse that came with doll rider Brenda Breyer and a bridle and bareback pad. (Photo from Identify Your Breyer.)

What might come in future Club releases? Thoughts of that give me happy chills. A lamp? A Pacer with a sulky? Flockies?  There are so many vintage models from the past that Breyer could recreate for the Club!

I joined the Vintage Collectors Club the year it opened and I have never regretted that decision. It just keeps getting better and better and I can't wait to see what else Breyer has in store for us in 2024.

(The drainboard blog post got bumped for today's post - I was so excited about Kirk and had to write about him. So, as I've been saying, stay 'tooned!)