Recycled Live III

Thank you to everyone who came yesterday and helped make it such a wonderful day. I really appreciate all the help from judges and those who stayed afterwards to help put away tables. 

The show was for British & Irish breeds of model horse. It re-used certificates and rosettes from old shows which is why there is so much variety! But it is great fun and raised lots of money for a local Oxfordshire environmental charity.

If you are friends with me on Facebook you can see all the pictures here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10156537916275155&type=1&l=57fb2ba513

But below are my selected highlights from the day :)

A lovely pinto Julip

Part of the raffle table - everyone was so very generous with the donations there were some really lovely prizes and we kept running out of space as people brought more and more stuff!

An in hand entry

A really gorgeous blanket spotted Julip

The Original Finish cob class

My own racing entry

One of the hunting entries

One of the entries for other performance - a four horse driven team

One of the scene entries

An entry for the 'Recycled Horse -Made on the Day' class

Original Finish Riding & Show Pony

The Vintage class (so much variety)

An example of what I have decided to name 'the corner of chaos'

A Pony Club jumping entry (complete with pretty amazing plaits)

Performance Championship

Performance Champion

Performance Reserve Champion

Performance Reserve to Reserve Champion - A Winning Ticket owned by myself

A little horse I painted winning his class

CTF Championship

CTF Champion

CTF Reserve Champion

CTF Reserve to Reserve Champion - CRS Charles Dickens owned by myself

Original Finish Championship

Original Finish Champion

Original Finish Reserve Champion

Original Finish Reserve to Reserve Champion

One of the other animal classes

Just a bit of sheep herding

Other Animal Championship

Other Animal Champion

Other Animal Reserve Champion

Other Animal Reserve to Reserve Champion

Custom Championship

Custom Champion

Custom Reserve Champion

Custom Reserve to Reserve Champion

AR Championship

AR Champion

AR Reserve Champion

AR Reserve to Reserve Champion

Supreme Championship

Supreme Champion

Another shot of the Supreme Champion to show his beautiful rosettes and huge trophy!

Reserve Supreme Champion

Reserve to Reserve Supreme Champion

It's Halloween!

It's Halloween and you know what that means? It means...HALLOWEEN HORSES! THOUSANDS OF HALLOWEEN HORSES!!!

So here are some pics of some of my own Halloween horses. I would love to see some pics of your models too, so definitely share them with me :D

First up is CRS Dark Memory aka Merry Widow

This model is from the mini Halloween horses Stablemate set

Second is CRS Fear Factor aka Twilight Terror

Twilight Terror was the 2007 Halloween Horse

Third is CRS Just a Little Scar aka Crane

Crane was the 2016 Web Special Halloween release.

Fourth is CRS Mercedes aka Merry Widow

Merry Widow was the 2003 Halloween release

Fifth is CRS Phantom Nights aka Phantom

Phantom was also from the Spooky Stablemates set

Sixth is CRS Unruhigen Träumen aka Nightmare

Night Mare was the 2014 Halloween horse.

Seventh is CRS Cinderella aka Poltergeist

Poltergeist was the 2016 Halloween horse.

Eighth is CRS Brown Dwarf Star aka Nosferatu.

Nosferatu was the 2002 Breyer Halloween horse.

A quick break now to look at this really cool picture of Twilight Terror with his lights flashing!

OK back to the list! Ninth up we have CRS Skeletor aka Skullduggery

Skullduggery was the 2001 Breyer Halloween horse.

Tenth we have CRS Mini Skullduggery aka Skullduggery

The final Stablemate model from the Spooky Stablemates set.

Missing is Calavera who is still in his box I'm afraid :( I think I've got all of the others I own!

3D Printing and Model Horses

This has become quite a topical discussion at the moment but is something that has been around in the model horse community for many years.

Many artist and sculptors have been using it as a way to scale their models up and down to produce them in different scales. There have been resins that are digitally sculpted around for a good few years now and this year for the first time you can now buy a resin of a 3D scanned horse (although the amount of work done to it post production has been amazing).

There are also an assortment of tack and prop makers out there who 3D print an assortment of different things for use with model horses, from little buckets to jump blocks to horse balls.

And if you happen to own your own 3D printer you can head along to websites such as Thingiverse and find all kinds of horse shaped objects to have a go at printing: https://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=horse

But of course it wasn't long before questions started to be asked.

Should 3D scanned horses be shown with other sculpted models? Was the question of a rather heated debate recently.

But I think more concerning to artists and to the community is the ease of use with which one can use a 3D printer to produce a copy of an existing model.

Click on this link: https://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=horse

And tell me how many items you recognise. They tend to be Schleich but there are a LOT on there and on other websites.

One plus point is that when you 3D print an object it does not look perfect. If you hate prep work you do not want to try and prep a 3D printed model! You'll be sanding and fixing until your hands fall off. It would be a lot easier to go out, buy the Schleich and repaint it (and probably a lot cheaper too).

Finding That Perfect Model

The thing I love most about the new look Chestnut Ridge is that you have the opportunity to see the model you are purchasing in advance.

No longer do you just get an image like this:

Which is great, you can see the product, but you don't know what your exact horse will be like. Will it be darker? lighter? will it have rubs? Will it be showing condition? What does it actually look like 'in the flesh'?

Now you get to choose a horse by seeing pictures like this:

Shown is the CollectA Mangalarga Marchador.

Essentially you receive the exact same model, it's still a brand new CollectA with tags attached. The only difference is that you can see the model in advance and know exactly what your getting. You won't need to return it because your model is rubbed, because you'll be able to tell in advance. Want a slightly darker or lighter variation? We offer you the choice of several different models so you can find your favourite.

You also have the chance to see what they look like in the flesh, great when the manufacturer pictures aren't that great!

It's definitely a unique way to buy model horses and I wish that I'd had the choice of such a dealer 10 years ago! I'm so lucky that now I can pick and choose my models, to find the right one for me :)

11 Years On...

It's Autumn, which means one thing. It is the anniversary of the creation of Chestnut Ridge. An anniversary that is always marked by the selling of our first ever item, Swan Lake:

Sold for around £10.00 on eBay Swan Lake was the first ever product that Chestnut Ridge sold. Back then nearly everything we sold was through eBay. After a few months of just selling customs we started selling tack as well.

It wasn't until 2009 that we got our own website. Within a year we had started selling a variety of hobby supplies as well as custom model horses, custom tack and second hand models.

In 2015 things changed a lot, as you can see from this Horse and Hound advert published in Autumn 2015:

We started selling Breyers, Schleich and CollectA. With hundreds of parcels leaving every month some days I could spend up to 8 hours just packing up models! It was insane!

Which is probably why when given the choice to re-evaluate things I chose to go back to routes. Customs, custom tack and hobby supplies with a selection of second hand model horses, back to our routes and back to what we were 8 years ago.

That said I do miss it, I miss the money (obviously) but coming up to Christmas, the busiest and most stressful time of the year the thing I miss most is the knowledge that on Christmas day hundreds of people will be brought joy as they opened presents purchased from Chestnut Ridge. Because that was always the best part of what we did. And I am going to have a little cry that I won't get that feeling this Christmas.