A Visit with Kelly Weimer, Part II

 

This second installment of our visit to Kelly Korber Weimer's collection will start with the side chamber of the basement and then explore the upper formal room (above).

 I first met Kelly in the 1990s when I used to attend Greater Pitt Model Horse Show.  She was part of what we called 'the Pitt crew,' along with Kelly Englesiepen (Keracher), Lucy Kusluch and Jan Wagner and her daughter Rebecca, and later Felicia Browell, who wrote the Breyer Collector Book Guides.  Between them the Kellys could answer nearly any question Felicia put to them.  That was just the beginning of an encyclopaedic knowledge-base of Breyer and Breyer's products. 

When we last saw this chamber, it looked like this (above).  The space has models on three sides, and I had to turn around to see them all.  If you're standing with your back to the cross corridor, this is what you see:  Hartlands!

Moving to the front of this shelf:  More Hartlands!!

 Naturally I asked what that blue foal was.  I learned it was (just as naturally) a digital print out.

Below.  The chestnut pinto Grazing Foal is an early repaint by Laura H. Behning.  It was found in an Ohio antique mall.

Moving to the right (see what I mean about miscellaneous?) these are various non-equines, dogs and cats.  Below, more miscellaneous.

Turning further right, one is hopefully going to be warm in the winter.   This is a more impromptu shot than most, but it shows the shape of the side chamber.  Turning right even more, the relationship of this space with the cross corridor should be clearer.  That's the main hallway behind the right edge of these shelves, below.

You can walk entirely around this part of the collection and come out near the two entryways.

Now it's time to move upstairs and take a look at the Room.  Farewell oh best of basements.  I could've stayed longer but I needed to see the upper collection while I still had ready access memory...!  and it's a good thing I did.   flourish of trumpets

This is the more formal, polished 'upper' edition of the collection.  It includes some very nice chinas (which I did not capture).   Upon entry the most intriguing thing about the room was the mural:

Kelly told me it was there when they bought the house.  No one knows who painted it.

Once again, my shots were not carefully calculated to cover all;  what you see here is post-processing, to roughly pass across the shelves left to right and top to bottom.  I asked about the roan Alborozo, and learned he is a repaint.

I was told the Florentine 5-Gaiter has a broken-off tail.

Both Kelly and myself have been looking for a Copenhagen Running Mare, so far without success.

Now that's a corner unit -- !  The chestnut pinto Mittens, next to the blue Ansel, was painted by Kelly.

Kelly told me she has all of the Stretch Morgans except Bennington (of whom only 3 were made).  I can also report she told me elsewhere she has about 63 Fighting Stallions.  This shelf is a spot I shot twice, just from sheer delight.  (And maybe to see those little Copperfoxes, Winstons, in many colors!)

The Charcoal Fighter at the end of this next shelf is from the Francis Collection.  He has far more brown tones than most charcoals I've seen.

The Running Foals are a particular favorite, not least with those cute Copperfoxes.

 This particular horse, visible in the bottom corner of photo 1 and photo'd here on the carpet, is unique.  He is very heavy, being solidly filled with resin.  Another with the same technology is the blue Rearing Stallion lying down at the end (above).  Their weight makes it impractical for them to stand (the legs bend).  Some of Breyer's ideas just didn't work out...!

After some thought I'm leaving this next shot as it came out, despite cutting off all those legs.  I like how the Kelly turned out.  :)

A impressive conga of Classic-scale Man O' Wars.  Without, should I point out, the solid-gold one of 2023.

And we're back where we started.  Breathless.

What a privilege it has been to aim a lens at this immense collection.  I am inspired and grateful.  Thank you, Kelly, so much.

A Visit with Kelly Weimer, Part I

On December 2 my husband and I had the great privilege of visiting with Kelly Korber Weimer and seeing her famous collection.  Ever since I'd first caught glimpses of this magnificent assembly (on FB, through zooms and elsewhere), I had privately yearned to see it in person.  That seemed impossible, despite the fact that she lived less than 3 hours away and in the same state.

Yet everything had come together.  That day the weather was decent (always a consideration).  My navigator husband wanted to get out of the house and go far away, but not have to worry about hunters.  Unspoken but real, we had finally reached the stage of being able to trust small numbers of friends indoors not to infect us, (so this is a covid emergence story).  On top of it all, I had the best excuse:  I had a horse to deliver.  And so it was settled.

In the basement of an ordinary-looking house is one of the wonders of the model horse world.  Kelly kindly let me blaze away.  My aim from the start was not so much documenting every beast, (which I felt was an impossibility), but to grasp their overall arrangement and layout.  How did the rooms (if they were rooms), fit into one another?   I wanted to keep their general outline in mind, which might help keep me from getting totally drunk and lost.  This was a skill I'd gained at BreyerFest over many years.

But there was a lot to get drunk on.  Be warned:  these 2 posts have a total of 64 pictures.

Starting in the basement, there were a couple of normal rooms, including this photography stage area.

The entrance to the mysteries is to the right of this.  Turning a corner, one sees a pair of doorways, and through them shelves can be seen going on to the end.  Left doorway:

And right.  The right hallway is intercepted by a cross corridor that leads to a side chamber, a space opening off the right side of a hall running parallel to the main hallway.  Even that corridor is lined with horses.

Here's a view straight into the side chamber, a place with some furnace ducts.  This room held miscellanea on 3 sides:  horses that were not Breyers, one of a kinds, overflows and extras (i.e. new molds) or those who did not fit into the general order.  That order, I realized, was congas.  The horses are arranged by mold.  Pretty much every shot was a conga shot.

I will be showing this chamber and another, far more formal, upstairs room in a second post.  For now, just going down those hallways was enough and more than enough for sensory overload.  I confess that no logical order was used while shooting.  I just grabbed!  (Any order you see here came along afterwards, a product of post-processing.)  

Right off the bat, at lower right through the left doorway, I found my current desired horse, a white foal.  Kelly wouldn't part with it, imagine that!

Then my progress became a sort of amazed swinging right and left, and just went on and on.  On the right:

On the left:

 The aisle or hallway that led to the side chamber resulted in some shelves being corner units.  I thought this very clever.  See the Emersonii above (10th photo) - they are below the Vermeers here.

Naturally, shorter horses took places on shorter shelves.  High on the right:  Shetland Ponies.

 Further on down this same lengthy aisle, the process repeated itself.  What? only one Alborozo?

(Above) The blue Lonesome Glory is a repaint.  (Below) Ahah, here is the mother of the foal I wanted, standing with others of her shape (Corazon, or Celeste:  Andalusian Mare).

Clearly a collection as large as this one has been years, decades, in the making.  I never did get a head count but it must be in the thousands.  For contrast, my own collection, over nearly the same span of time, tops out at about four hundred, not counting SMs.

Deeper and deeper into the mysterious depths.  The chestnut PAS on the end is by Kathy Maestas, and was found in an antique shop.

The zebras were on a cross corridor corner. 

At last, at the ends of the earth, I saw the back wall.   These two shots give the atmosphere of the place pretty well.

With a wide brim hat, a long tail and a camera around my neck, I had to be careful how I turned around.  At first I kept muttering, "I didn't know it would be this small."  I meant the space they all were in -- I felt they deserved a great deal of room.   Memories from the Patagonia Museum of the Horse in AZ n the 1970s, and, further back, winding through the tourist alleys of Nogales, Mexico, were in my brain.  This was before I realized there was an entire room on the first floor with a lot more horses.

And when I did, the first thing I said was, "So that's where the other Alborozos are!"  She laughed out loud.

Pin Sale Post

 

When you collect pins as assiduously as I have, you're bound to wind up with a few extras.  Some of these were purchased with resale in mind; some are duplicates; and some, like the earrings, were genuine mistakes on my part.  This post will be a close look at all the pins I currently have for sale or trade.  Trade wishlist is at the bottom of this post!

There's one big caveat:  Unless you grab these by Dec 15th, everything's on hold til late January.  I'm old enough to invoke the ancient hobby habit of no mail order during the Christmas rush.  (We were afraid we'd lose our precious ponies;  too often, we did.)  I'm out of town from Jan 2 to 26 and cannot post packages while canoeing down South.   (Which doesn't mean I can't mail off Christmas letters.  But I digress...)

Isn't this a cute pin (above)?  For all that he's 1.25 inches tall, I had to get this one when I first saw him!  It's a Daniel Muller Indian Pony, and I hadn't known this pin existed.  As luck would have it, I found a Stein & Goldstein Stander pin I hadn't known existed either, and had to get that one,... and with him came this.  So it's a genuine duplicate in my collection. 

Almost the same story applies to this graceful blue and white Stein & Goldstein Jumper (below).  I already had one, from long ago, but that Stander came accompanied.  Each of these carousel cuties should be priced somewhere around $15 plus $5 postage.

You'll have to forgive photography of these two in their cellophane.  Each one comes with a brass pinch clasp for the back.

 I suppose it had to happen sooner or later!  I thought those Minkiewicz earrings would be dandy little pins on their own;  I thought I could disassemble them and display them by themselves.  But when they arrived, I changed my mind.  A rare thing happened:  I didn't like a Mink pin product.  I suspect not wearing earrings had something to do with it,...

In themselves these are absolutely charming examples of what can be done with Mink's art.  They really are tiny;  the zebras are one inch  high.  They and the Quaggas are hook earrings with silver hardware.  I am willing to let them go for $50 a pair plus $5 postage.  (The release price for these hook earrings was forty.)

The size of the Quaggas is 1.13 inches high, a smidge bigger than their friends the zebras.  But you should see the Unicorns!  These mini miracles are just half an inch!!  Rose gold in color, these are pinback earrings.  The pins stick right out of the package.  Yup:  right through the cellophane...  It's another miracle that they traveled safely in their bubble envelope...

These are versions of none other than Mink's very first pin, Unicorn One, first sold in January of 2021.  Here's a close up:

Aren't they charmers!  The release price for these pinback earrings was thirty-five, so I'm thinking of charging $40 + $5 postage.

 The remaining three pins are standard Mink issues:  Faleadon the Imperial Unicorn (released August 24 of this year), Driving in Style Gelderlander from BreyerFest 2023, and Runicorn III, released December 8 of 2022.  I'm asking $40 each + $5 postage.

You can read more about Faleadon and the Gelderlander in my latest blog post on pins:  Fibonacci Pins.

They both have fantastic sparkle backgrounds!

The same sparkle applies to the mythic Runicorn:

 Trade and Wish List:  repeat after me:  Any of the above, up to three pieces, for Mink's Dancing Horses Bastian and Trinka.  These pins were released in January of 2022 (Bastian) and Sept of 2021 (Trinka) and were the second and first Dancing Horse pins ever released.  That has something to do with how rare they are, but not all:  I suspect the news just hasn't migrated far enough.

Thanks for looking!