Appaloosas In Miniature: The Grand Champion Era

When a horse crazy girl has no horse of her own on which to lavish affection, she naturally directs her energies to the next best thing: collecting models. A few of Ransom’s predecessors still hold a place of honor in my room, though most of them are stalled in cardboard boxes with not-so-distant childhood memories.

I graduated from My Little Ponies to Grand Champions around age six. If I saved up my one dollar weekly allowance for two months, I could buy a new one. The first appaloosa to join my collection was a bay blanket filly named Starfinder. Her mother Running Spring joined soon after, the prize of one of those saving sprees. Her father, Indian Summer was a hand-me-down resulting from the tragic event of my best friend/cousin moving across the country.

Every model horse had a story, and I knew their names by heart. So well, in fact, that I coerced my younger sister into playing the “name game” with me – a twenty questions sort of game that involved knowing every model on the shelf. The shelves filled as I took over Daddy’s eBay account to hunt for the missing models in my collection. The elusive Indian appaloosa horses Walks-On-Snow and Little Bird joined the ranks of my mail-order herd, but the real triumph was nabbing the leopard appaloosa family Renegade, Snow Patch, and Papoose.

In high school, I forayed into the world of customizing. During extra time in art class, I transformed my duplicates into new creatures – appaloosas of course. Phantom, who began life as a beat-up buckskin, transformed into Flekkur, a handsome blue roan appaloosa. He, along with the other spotted steeds in my Grand Champion collection, became a cherished forerunner of one very special gelding.

Walks On Snow

Renegade, Snow Patch, & Papoose



Flekkur

Starfinder