Knowing your friends will gather there is maybe the ultimate! And that’s where having a location that’s got at least some elements of a sweet spot, convenient to get to, pleasant meal options, nice surroundings, all of that helps make it a place friends gather.

South Coast Classic held several events at the Los Angeles Arboretum back in the day. That was such a lovely place to gather, personally convenient for me because I lived nearby, but also the light and surroundings meant I always had the best day there, even took some outside photographs in between classes.

And I showed them in performance, too! Here is poor Akron being made to be a roping horse, and badly!

Small, cramped setup; terrible lighting; plastic western saddle; out of scale dirt clumps; roping a foal not a calf…

Back in the day when I first started showing, OF was all makes so Hagen-Renaker showed against Breyer. Having H-Rs to show in those classes was hugely advantageous and I was so fortunate to have some very nice pieces, both from my Aunt’s collection and then from the large reissues that I bought with the princely and painful sums of ~$40 each IIRC as a teen in the 1980s.

Here is another one from my collection, the white Abdullah, very pale grey standing arabian stallion, this image of the right side. also given to me by my aunt from her 1950s era collection. He is one of the few who came with a break, a clean break in the left forearm. I love this piece so very much.

When Young Ferseyn came out, I admired but did not have the coin. I had regrets every time I saw someone receiving theirs, and even more when I saw Joan’s in person at Clinky Mayhem. I bid on a special one that Kristina offered after the run was complete and was the underbidder, but I managed to get offered another one slightly after that I also love. I should photograph them together, haven’t done that yet. But this mold, oh, so special to me.

These would not be for marathon carriages, but Lisa Sharpe has also found a vendor to make bike-like wheels in a size suitable for arena vehicles. You can find them here: Miniature bike wheels

Wow, what a treasure that Judy Renee Pope piece is!

And I also will keep my first custom forever. ❤️

Thanks for taking it out for a spin! Having real conversation is essential for evaluating the tool.

I think it’s really interesting to have classlists that change, and it’s something a showholder can do to freshen up a show that might otherwise feel ‘routine’ for zero cost.

When shows start to feel routine, I think some entrants take them for granted… it will be just like the last show, there will always be another.

Not every show has to offer every class or every division, and giving people a reason to bring out horses they don’t usually bring can be a way to increase engagement. I love the idea of offering era divisions for OF Plastic or really any division; customs and resins benefit from them too. Most of us have pieces in our collections that are either not competitive or are too much trouble to bring, but a class just for them changes the calculation.

And sharing the old pieces can be really fun! That oldest custom you have in your collection, or a horse that won everything back when it was new, and suddenly you can bring him out for everyone to see again. I loved bringing out my very first custom, a running mare repainted bay appaloosa in Testor’s enamels, to the Jennifer Show, with her story.

I love seeing people have fun with performance classlists too! Candyland Live with its Everything Pink class, that’s just delightful. It’s fun to come up with an entry and so fun to see what other people will do.

I think people have been using either 2000 or 20 years, but this is just a fun thread, so it hardly matters. Share what you like! Or starting a new thread of My First Custom is fun too!

I have those foals in my early collection as well, and in a couple of colors! They are so cute, and I must also say, a true miracle of mass production pulling those tiny legs from the mold and for the very low price point too.

This is a stablemate I did as a custom order for Nora Doyle back in the 1980s. I understand her collection did not survive her. She had a few of my models. We corresponded for years and my day was always brighter when I got a letter from her in the mailbox.

Cadfael’s Cygnet was a SM QH mare refined a bit, and painted dappled grey in oils with a braided hair mane and tail.

This is Star Attraction, my echo of the blood bay Ruffian in the OP, made a decade or so later:

Welcome friends! Very curious to hear what people are thinking. And if it’s something that doesn’t appeal, that is also welcome feedback.

The look and feel is pretty easy to change, and I can make new categories at will - just didn’t put time into those things yet.

In theory, the tools make it possible to download all of your own posts and save them as well as moving them to a new Lemmy instance. This is probably the most attractive point to me given how many resources we’ve lost in the annals of time. The full download to a local file doesn’t just work with a button but I believe that is in progress.

This looks pretty good on Voyager but I notice it is a little more awkward to reply. It was also tricksy to get it set up with an existing account login but I figured it out eventually. This is a test to see how well comments work

If you want to use this on a phone, there are several apps for Lemmy that should be able to connect to it. I am experimenting with one called Voyager. The link in the comment above gives you a few to look at, or search Lemmy on your device’s app store.

The Jennifer Show was just amazing for me. The competition was fierce, the company was spectacular, and the day after the show I got to go on a fabulous trail ride in the Rockies with some of my favorite people. I loved the performance challenge and seeing the creativity. The depth of the performance classes was just incredible. I loved that every entrant got two medallions -one to keep and one to give away to the thing at the show that they most loved, whatever it was.

And I had fun making an original sheep sculpture to compete in the other animal performance. The special performance challenge day was so good with wonderful fun prizes, and Jen Buxton did a wonderful job of collecting fun prizes and then distributing them appropriately in ways they would be enjoyed.

I also made a weird rider for my dinosaur that is still sitting right here on my desk.

I kind of had to move heaven and earth to make that show happen for me, and I’m so glad that I did. What a great time that was.

Although I love bringing out my OFP, to me prizes in that division end up feeling fairly random, since my collection is mostly nice examples of relatively common pieces. (Even the low number pieces, it’s likely there’s going to be more than one of them at any particular show in my area.) The lighting of the hall, what other people bring, all that mean that while I have several live show champion OF plastic models, it’s rare for any of them to be consistent big winners. The fun is in unpacking them, admiring them, playing with them, and maybe getting a few ribbons while doing the same among friends.

By contrast, among my customs and resins, (as well as my performance entries), and even the china, I have several consistent winners, so if winning is important to me, I focus on them.

But to me a show is about the people and interactions most of all. When I’m thinking about a show experience, the first thing I’m thinking about is that it is an outing with friends. I don’t want to pay $50 to go to an event where I don’t think I’ll get to talk to anyone or have fun, but I’ll pay $1000 all in to go to an event where I will learn new things, socialize with multiple amazing people, especially people I don’t usually get to see in person, and have an incredible memorable time.

When I think about it that way I don’t care so much what percentage of that goes to the show fees and what percentage goes to the hotel and rental car people.

Adding some more pictures of this Limerick that I dug out:

Limerick with the mold opened, but still against one piece of plaster

Closeup of the demolded Limerick with the pour sprue removed but all the seams still present

Then we cut them in half to check our work (I had poured mine too thick FWIW) and we returned them to the mud:

A bucket of clay slip, with various pony parts melting and disappearing into it.

We used old, retired molds that no longer had the requisite detail for production; this was just practice so we could understand the process.

One of my all time favorite events, in terms of destination fun, was the Bring Out Your Chinas Convention in 2011 in the San Diego area. (Yes! I still think about it!)

It also is the only model horse show I’ve ever traveled to by train, which was also fun.

What made it wonderful?

• The workshops. That picture of me demolding a Limerick I poured is something I treasure. Yes she went right back in the slip bucket after. But getting that hands on experience was utterly priceless.
• More about the workshops. People tried china painting and sculpted medallions and learned to make plaster molds, and we all did it together. So much fun!
• Joanie showed us a plaster Stormwatch mold and gave us a significant show and tell about what it took to make that mold and make castings from it
• There were neat lectures about manufacturers and horse color and other stuff
• It was set up so we had catered meals for the whole group, so we had the opportunity to all eat together for every meal and mix and match our meal companions easily.
• The event drew people from all over the US and two artists from the UK.
• There was also a show, and while that wasn’t the most important memory for me personally, people really Brought Out Their Chinas. I was able to see pieces in person that I had never seen before, all kinds of really old and interesting pieces, fantastic custom glazes, all kinds of niche pieces that would not usually come out at a standard show.

But, I think what really made it a great event was the people and the communal atmosphere. We were all together most of the time and well able to really interact and socialize. I made many new friends that weekend, people who maybe I kind of knew in the hobby but hadn’t really talked to much. To me, that is the thing that makes a show really great - when I go home with new friends. And these are lasting friendships, to this day, with people I met that weekend.

Thanks so much to Joan Berkwitz and Kristina Lucas Francis and Adalee Hude and all the others who masterminded and ring-circused and cat-herded the whole event, which was just fabulous. I’m so glad I was able to make the time to be there.

The part about “someone I want to talk to will be there” is hard for a showholder to control for, and after all that person may be different for each potential entrant! But realistically, it is a huge reason that will put me over the line to go to a show. Sometimes it will be someone there to judge, but it can also be the people who have chimed in publicly to say they are coming.

Of course, when someone is judging, they may not have a lot of downtime to talk to me or anyone.