I have a system similar to Chrissytree's! You can get the pieces at a hardware store. I bet bringing them her picture and asking for that would help.

I will post a picture soon but am a bit confused by photobucket...let me just say I'm really happy with this kind of shelving! The white background shows off rainbow ponies nicely.

It's funny, I know at least two neighborhood convenience stores in San Francisco have them. As I like to say, you can get Kinder eggs in the US, you just have to know a guy.

I got one with a minion dressed as a pirate recently. I suppose the part of the law that applies to a product deemed safe in most countries isn't very strictly enforced when it comes to simple chocolate eggs.

I will put that on my to watch list! It sounds adorable. And I wish I had known Lauren Faust was doing conventions again! I'm in CA and could have hoofed it south for the weekend if I'd known. I saw Bonnie at Everfree Northwest this year, she seems so sweet and down to earth. Did you attend the panel?

Nope! As far as I understand it, prototyping is all about tweaking the design process. Some toy prototypes even get market tested in focus groups so toy companies can decide how to market their product before the toys are put into production.  On his blog, James Gurney, author of Dinotopia, discusses some of the toy concepts that were made for an unproduced Dinotopia movie. Particularly interesting is his discussion of how when presented with Dinotopia toys, boys liked to pretend to feed and take care of the dinosaurs, instead of just playing out battles and attacks, so Hasbro assigned their boys and girls toy design teams to work together on the project! It makes you think about the impact the media we choose to present to kids affects the way they play and about gender stereotypes in general. You can read the post here: http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2008/06/action-figures.html?m=1 

But I digress. This website http://www.happyworker.com/toy-design-prototyping  is from a company that you can hire to create a toy prototype for you, and their list of services says a lot about what the process entails. Prototypes are made to determine production costs, to test mechanisms and design specifications.

You can also check out the little documentary about working in a toy prototyping shop at this link.  http://www.core77.com/posts/25401/a-look-inside-a-toy-prototyping-studio-25401

Hope you find that helpfull and interesting!

I have a pretty decently sized G1 collection and they've all been tracked down in the wild! A toy store in my area specializes in selling used and vintage stuff, and they get new g1 ponies in all the time. I guess people figure it's more convenient than Ebay, and more folks than you might expect still have their old G1s. Other than that, I type my little pony into Craigslist a lot. Once found a girl who had collected ponies through out her childhood and was selling off a very complete g1 collection for not very much per pony because she wanted extra money for college.

My most exciting recent find was a sea pony with her shell for $25! She was very clean.

Thank you Hathorcat! I will give that a try.

I still have a few more straight haired ones to practice on. The Applejack I got has a slightly curly tail, so I will see how that holds up. The ponies I used shampoo and conditioner on seemed to come out with smoother hair than the ones that just got soaped, but should I do the procedure you suggested to all of them to get rid of chemical traces? They also aren't sticky any more, so I'm glad it wasn't plasticizer leaching, just hair spray.

Thanks again!

Thanks for the advice, Nhal039! I'm glad to hear it's a reasonably common practice. Does anyone have more advice or photos on how to do it, though? Do you tug up or to the side? Do you boil the shell, like you would to remove a pony head? Use floss or thread around the seem?

LightningElectricDream, I don't have a swirled shell, just the usual clam shell. But if I did I would make a mold of that too!

Sunshine ponies are one of my favorite pony collections! Beachball is my favorite pony (sunshine or otherwise) because she was my first pony. My mom got her for me as a surprise when she found out I wanted ponies. I remember coming home from school and finding her stuffed in the mailbox! That and her lovely bright saturated purple color is fantastic.

Seaflower is my other favorite. I had her as a kid too but I called her Seashell and decided she was a boy. Seashell and Beachball were baby Rainribbon's (renamed Rainbow's) parents. I still have my original ones and I've picked up Sanddigger and Mainsail.

The sunshine ponies are adorable and probably one of my favorite collections. So many memories. So brightly colored and cute.