When I started writing this blog, I had great intentions of updating at least once a month - 12 times in a year isn't that much to write but, life gets in the way... I'm still enjoying my Julips and taking part in lots of photo shows. In fact, this summer I hosted my own photo show in place of our annual live show.
I love planning photo shows, choosing which classes to include, seeing all of the entries coming in and choosing prizes. The joy of photo shows, is that you don't have to limit yourself to a reasonable timeframe like you do for a live show. When you hold a live show, you have to consider how many classes you can realistically fit into one day. This means certain sections can be more limited than everyone would really like, but you have to merge classes or miss entire sections. Even since I started collecting, there have been over 15 new/recast moulds released, and only one discontinued. So, 'Mould' classes now feel tighter than ever when you have 5, 6, 7 or more different moulds competing in the same class. As a result, I tend to go a bit wild with classes when I host a photo show.
The only downside of this is that when you come to judge the show, it's a daunting task. There were around 86 classes in our recent photo show, with up to 56 entries per class - That's a lot of Julips!
I'm not sure if it's a universal model horse show fact, but as long as I've been Julip showing, the most popular colour class has been for Greys. There were so many entries in our show that we made the decision to split the entries into Dappled and Non-Dappled. Oddly, despite having a real grey horse, I've never been a huge fan of grey horses. I suppose it's probably because we had a grey pony that I don't love them... As much as Cail was a loveable rogue, he never looked clean and made it his life ambition to be a black pony like his field companions.
Coincidentally, the most popular mould class was for Cob Mares, which is the mould I chose for Cail's Julip Portrait. Sadly in June this year, we had to make the decision to put Cail to sleep, so his portrait means more to me than ever before.
Hopefully I'll get myself organised and it'll be less than 6 months before I post again!
