Back at it for yet another year, Erica Ferguson and I planned a NaMoPrepMo party to get ourselves ready for February. This year however: the pandemic. Despite Erica moving closer to me and working only 12 min away, our province went into a state of emergency mid January. Stay at home orders cancelled all of our annual traditions of snacking, prepping, and riding Iero. We decided to switch gears and move online! We confirmed that it would work by testing it on my Dinner & Prep party with our local hobbyists, which was a great success. However, we still felt we needed to have our annual personal bonding time!
Erica's victim:
Erica wanted to be different this year and also to chip into new territory with creating a custom gemstone horse on a curio scale Spirit Riding Free Breyer. An impressive feat since she is planning to start customization now by molding her own unicorn horn, gems, and creating a base! The horse will be based on her birthstone, the ruby, and it already sounds amazing! This ruby horse she is hoping to create as part of a series and really looks forward towards creating an opal horse!
She isn't entirely sure what her extra's for the month will be, but I hope she works on her Ember micro and her saddlebred palomino stablemate!
My Victim:
An Eberl curio scale Icelandic resin. I really hate this scale and have ptsd with trying to paint my curio scale Moxie and breaking her leg. However, I plan to move passed my fears and do this pony as a mealy bay. My reference is a gelding I rode in Iceland named Stormvic, but unfortunately I don't really have photos of him. I plan to challenge myself mostly with the scale and be happy with the result.
I'm extra excited about this guy because I actually finished prepping and priming over 10 days ago so he is ready for his finish work!
My extra pieces for the month are all Maggie's micros: Castanea (bay), Lyskra (chestnut pinto), Thunderdrone (seal brown), Bangles (liver chestnut), and Ultramax (chestnut).
Perhaps I can also get Tennessee (silver bay) and Teenytoo (pigeon) in which are half way primed!
Our party consisted of catching up on the latest news about each other's lives; work, new recipes, our cats, and other things that we hadn't been able to properly chat about. Even though the pandemic has slowed a lot of peoples lives down, Erica and I have been busy with our own jobs and unable to commit a serious amount of time to frivolities like just chatting! In fact, we've barely seen each other at all this year! Earlier in the year, we were determined to ride once a week, but everything fizzled out when lockdowns began across the country. As things got worse, the less and less of each other we got to see which made this mini prepping party such a breath of fresh air!
As Erica worked on creating her gems and rocks out of apoxie, I decided to work on a project that has been nagging me for three years: Maggie Bennett's micro, Ember. My arch nemesis that for some reason I decided to paint in leopard appaloosa. He has fallen over, been stripped, and redone twice... making this his third attempt. I'm not about to quit just yet, but it certainly is tempting.... hopefully he will be my first for the "I Did It Too" album.
When Erica's boyfriend, Justin, arrived home, it was dinner time! Both of us whipped out matching Mac n' cheese for the authentic feel of our prepping parties in the days of old. We miss the days of driving over for a steak dinner or simply picking up a pizza... but a cheers through the monitor had to do this time around.
We did both agree it didn't feel as wooly or as cozy as it usually did... no sleep over, no foaling watch, no new recipes, no playing customizing videos on the side, no riding Iero, or any of the things that made it all warm and fuzzy feeling. But although we chatted about how sad we were about those facts, we both agreed that a party from home was a wise decision especially with the rising numbers in Covid-19 cases. As much as a lot of people don't want to believe it, there is a problem and part of it is people not caring enough to stay home. My contractor who does work around the farm said to me;
"I don't really care if I get sick and die, and I don't really care if I pass it on to someone else because it's just the flu."
You can call it a flu or whatever you like but at the end of the day, a lot of people are suffering and dying. If you want to talk about a 99% survival rate, that still means tens of thousands of people die. Don't be stupid and just stay home.
So as much as Erica and I love getting together to bond over model horses, we decided to stay online. You should do the same and if you are not in the same household, keep your NaMoPaiMo parties to an online platform. We know it sucks and the entire pandemic sucks, but let's do our best to make it a great NaMoPaiMo anyways!
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