On the First Day of Breyerfest

     On this first day of Breyerfest... I didn't really do any Breyerfesting. I did answer a message saying that I was not in Kentucky. I did look at the website this morning at 9:00... but nothing was happening and nothing was open. So I went to the Brimfield Flea Market and I walked for miles. I also visited with my aunts, Yvonne and Deb. I really should do that more often. Doing anything is hard for me these days. I seem to be really short on want-to. 

     This week I did manage some doll work, even without much want-to. I started dremeling a batch of dolls, for a batch of hunt seat dolls (with bendy necks). I had a chair for once, so I decided to do a bunch more. Now I have dolls prepped for next week and at least part of the week after. I feel very efficient!

     I also talked myself into sewing several hunt seat outfits. Every single one of them is identical, though the dolls will not be. I still have a couple of the custom African American heads from my friend Roberto, and I decided she was going to be a hunt seat doll. Hairing a resin head is so much different than hairing a vinyl head. And it doesn't have to be awesome, since there will be a helmet covering a lot of it. 

    Yesterday I did talk myself into working later than I usually do. I have been trying not to work more than Tuesday-Thursday (on dolls) and only up until supper. I need to have boundaries on when I can work or I will just work all the time. And then be mad about working all the time. But since I have been a little bit of a slacker when it came to work this week I decided it was OK to work a bit after supper. And I got these dolls nearly finished. They all are even a little bit further than in this photo. Another hour or hour and a half will likely finish them up. 

     So what did I do on this first day of Breyerfest? I thought about wearing my volunteer T-shirt. But then realized I did not want to wear sleeves to walk around Brimfield. Though I have to say, it was not an overly hot day today. But there is a LOT of pavement, a lot of people, and not a lot of shade. So I did not wear my Breyerfest T-shirt. Maybe in the Fall. Anyway, I saw a Breyer at the Flea Market, but really only one I think (I wasn't looking). When I got back home I cleared everything out of the back of my car and, after Travis got home, we went and picked up a chair for Elecktra. Good times. I am not actually mad, even though I look it in the photo, this was just proof of chair, lol. 

     After we dropped off the chair we went to Khol's to do an Amazon return and stopped at Walmart to try to find the mineral water Ethan likes and can never find. Nope, still none. We came home and had supper and I did look in on virtual Breyerfest a bit, even though it was "closed". I watched a few minutes of the evening show, looked in the store to see if I wanted to buy anything (still undecided), looked at the contest entries, and checked out Facebook a bit to see if people were posting about Breyerfest (of course they were). I thought again about entering the Resin Futurity, but realized that since I sold Bootlegger, I don't have any good photo show photos of RESIN horses. Mocha Latte has OK photos, but after putting together my seminar, I know that they are not great. 

     So can we talk about my seminar for a minute? I have actually been wanting to talk about that for MONTHS, but have not been able to, since it wasn't announced. That super secret stuff I was talking about way back? When I then alluded to it being about my workshop, lol, it was NOT about my workshop! My workshop was SIMPLE to record, took very little time, and the editing was not a big deal. The seminar filming was a hot mess! Not only is it pretty hard to put together an hour of stuff when you are basically talking to yourself (I could talk for WAY more than an hour on judging if I had people in front of me!) but the weather was completely uncooperative. First, I needed to film in March. There are not a lot of days in March, in Massachusetts, that are even warm enough to spend a whole bunch of time out in my yard. I also don't even sort of have enough room indoors to set up a table full of entries. Or even a couple of entries. This past March we also pretty much had two types of weather; raining or super windy. The day I chose to go out and get my footage started out... nice. So I pulled all the crap out and got started on setting up a bunch of trail entries. I got a bunch of footing down, all the poles and things, the documentation, and I was starting to put horses on the table (which I had already spent a stupid amount of time putting tack on). And guess what? The wind started. And not a gentle breeze, but gusting winds! There was no way to keep the documentation on the table, and some of the gusts were enough to knock over horses. So now I started to panic a bit. HOW was I going to get the footage I needed? The answer was my daughter's new and still mostly empty apartment. She didn't yet have a kitchen table, so I set up in her mostly empty kitchen. I filmed, did tack changes, filmed, more tack changes, screwed up, kept filming, screwed up, restarted the sentence I was talking about. What I learned from last year is to just keep going, you can always edit the messed up stuff out later. Sometimes even nicely. 

     Anyway, after the horrifying time of trying to figure out how to get my footage I finally managed it. And I had a lot of it. I then spent days editing out the messed up stuff, fiddling with speeding up some parts that did not need to be seen in slow detail, doing other editing tricks to take out stuff that wasn't needed... then I put together the photo show groups. In case you have not seen my seminar, what I did was showed a live show class, such as western trail, and then did a photo show class. I talked about how I would judge each one, and then "placed" the class. Every single entry was mine so I was brutally honest about things. And I realized, while judging my photo show pics against each other, more of why they are not doing consistently well. It's because they are good, but mostly they are not great. After a long day of taking show pics I am tired and my eyes and brain say that the good picture is correct. And yeah, mostly they are. But they have flaws. What I need to do is go back to the way I have done photos of groups of dolls, but apply it to photo show pics. What I mean is I need to take a series of pics of a setup, that looks perfectly correct, and then I need to blow them up and look at them in minute detail, before I take the entry apart. Then if it passes the scrutiny of being blown up and picked apart, then maybe I can move on to changing the entry. This plan would be a whole lot easier if I had a place to set up a table and my arena, and do a handful of photos at a time. Or even just a couple and come back to it on another day. That would be awesome. I bet I could even enjoy doing show photos that way. Dreams are nice.

     So to sum up, on this first day of Breyerfest I walked for miles out in the heat (it was only in the mid 80s and I don't think it was all that humid). I drank lots of water, that I paid a lot of money for, visited with some of my favorite people, bought a few little things for myself, looked at horse-shaped objects, picked up and delivered a chair, and thought way too much about photo showing. I wonder what the second day of Breyerfest will bring me!