Newbies!

I meant to post this last week but er...you know the drill. XD

Anyway, I came away from the show with a handful of new arrivals and I honestly couldn't be happier with them!

First up is the gorgeous Sullivan, who'll probably be either a Connemara or another Highland for the growing herd. Her name popped into my head almost immediately, and it wasn't until I told Heather that it hit me - I'd accidentally named her after her mum's adorable black cat! 😂

Out of all the grey Julips I have, she's definitely the darkest and I've been after something similar for years, so to find it first time on my favourite mould was just perfect luck! She's had her head dropped a little too which gives her such personality!

Before she could officially join the rest of the herd however, she needed a little tweak...

The mohair Julip uses now is beautifully soft but can go insanely frizzy, as evident here once I got her home...

 

That just wouldn't do at all, so she went on a little trip to the grooming area in the Livery stables for a hose down and a thorough makeover.

Lake District Live 2017

As with the same show last year, I travelled down to the Lakes with my friend (and new owner of Magpie Models) Heather, though this time we had an extra travelling companion in Magda, who I'd seen last a few weeks prior at the RHS. She didn't currently have any Julips, but we assured her from personal experience that she'd manage to acquire at least one in the spares. :P

The journey was good, save for that one time the sat-nav directed us around the world's smallest roundabout! (which was literally a clump of grass in a very narrow country lane!) We were staying somewhere different from our usual room at the George Washington pub, this time we'd be at the Arnside Independent Hostel  overlooking the estuarine Morecambe Bay.

We arrived in good time; so good in fact that we were far too early to book in, so we went for a wander instead.

Photobucket missing photos - heads up!

As some of you may know, Photobucket has decided, in their wisdom(!) that they'd like to charge their users an exorbitant fee ($300 a year!)for the privilege of using them as an image host, - which, frankly, is their only purpose as a website - and aren't letting some of those with higher views work until I pay up. At the moment it's still free to use to store your images but it looks like they're going to start charging people to allow them to post stuff on forums and websites.

I'm definitely not going to do that, and instead I'm going to find a new host and move things there, but as I have thousands of (mostly old) images, this may take some time so please bear with me!

Some of my old photostories on my other blog are now completely ruined, but I've managed to download all the original images, (albeit low quality ones as PB resized them and I've since lost the original files) so I'll be able to fix them. Some of my reaction gifs and old photos of tack and things will be gone soon too so some of my older blog posts are likely to look a little strange for a while.

I'm hoping to upload those to another host in the coming weeks so all should be well eventually. The majority of my 30k+ photos are on Flickr, so they're safe at least.

Anyway, this is just a head's up to anyone who uses Photobucket  that it's probably wise to get copies of all your files! I've seen people wondering whether this is a last minute cash grab before they go bankrupt or something as it's just so extreme, so yeah, back up your stuff just in case!