Originally published June 28, 2013
Hi, I’m Heather and I’m a model horse collector. If the term means nothing to you, it would probably be best if you just backed away slowly without making eye contact. Trust me. If you thought, “Oh cool, me, too!”, you’ll feel right at home here.
I’ve been collecting since I was 8 years old and rather than growing out of it the way my parents hoped I would, my interest in the hobby grew, as did my collection. I actively collect, I’ve been a live show judge for many years, I’m rather passively involved in online photo showing, and in 2917 I took over the ownership of a vintage British model horse brand called Magpie Model Horses. This and my other model horse projects can be found at The Lab Rat Tango
Early in 2013, I was struggling with the redesign of my website; I wanted it to be more than just an online version of my collection database, but I got bogged down in the details – variations, special runs, regular runs, groups, pairs, sets, how much to say in the history section, how much to discuss on an image-by-image basis – then after much hair pulling and a period spent whimpering in a corner I decided to take a break from the project for a while.
Later that summer, while gently blowing the dust off of a few lines of Stablemates, the thought finally occurred: why am I trying to reinvent the wheel? Why not abandon a site which is time consuming to keep up-to-date and take the pictures and information I had assembled and feed it to a blog? Since Stablemates make up the bulk of my collection and were the main source of my redesign frustration, I decided to focus on them.
After four years and over three hundred posts, I came to the decision to wind things up as I was about to open Magpie Model Horses and would no longer have time for the blog. I brought the posts up to the end of the G3 models, which was a good stopping point as the releases of molds and models was starting to enter a rather frantic and boggy period of history for the brand.
In February of 2020 I decided to close down the blog and put my writings into a website instead. The content here is the same as on the blog and is unlikely to be updated any further. In May of 2022, for various reasons, I decided to convert the blog into a website; the update status remains uncertain.
The information presented here is based on study of the yearly catalogues, various printed collector guides, issues of JAH, hobby gossip, reference sites such as Model Equus and Identify Your Breyer, and personal experience. If you spot a error or would care to expand upon a topic, please feel free to leave a comment or email me; I’m always happy to learn more about the hobby.
If this is the first you’ve heard about model horse collecting, Breyer‘s website has a fairly informative hobby section.