Long time lover…

…first time poster.

Hi! I’m new here. I’ve loved dragons ever since I was a little girl, maybe 4 or younger. I love to draw and create other art as seen here: http://stasher-dragon.deviantart.com/

here: http://fanart.lionking.org/Artists/StasherDragon/

and here: http://www.side7.com/gallery.cgim?member=Stasher_dragoN

The first time I saw and fell in love with Pena’s Windstone art was when I was about 4 or 5. Every year my parents and I would vacation in the Wisconsin Dells. We had a favorite pizza place called “Upper Crust” on the second floor of this one building on the main shopping drag. On the first floor below the pizzeria was a whimsical gift shop with wooden kaleidoscopes, stone spheres, wooden spheres painted to look like stone (no joke), crystals, sculptures, figurines, et cetera. In one of the cases I saw these beautiful, realistic flap cats. I remember the flap cats specifically, but am sure there were also some griffins and horses/Pegasus and such. I took my time to look really hard at all the detail and the shape of the pose and colors as far around the case as I could.

I was in love. I never knew a statue could be so detailed and beautiful! And I noticed all this when I was so young!

When I was about 10 or 11, after a hiatus from Wisconsin, we went back to that gift shop and found that it had gone 🙁 Upper Crust was still there, but later left as well D’:

Back home in Chicago there was this store in a mall called Cinderella. They had a number of Windstone statues in a cabinet that I could look at all around. On the top (not inside) was displayed a magnificent peacock scratching dragon. I thought of him as the store’s mascot. Whenever I visited that mall I always wanted to go to Cinderella to see what Windstone sculptures they had and if they had one that I would consider pleading to my parents to get for me.

Between 2001 and 2002 my husband (boyfriend at the time) saw how much I loved Windstone dragons and promised he’d buy one for me. I got one of those little catalogs of Windstone statues and marked off which ones I wanted and which ones to get instead if the one I wanted wasn’t in stock.

I wanted a peacock Spectral dragon and that’s exactly what I got!

Not too long after we got the sad news that Cinderella was going out of business/leaving. I told my husband that we had to go there and get another dragon. What I didn’t expect was that he was going to go crazy with his wallet. We weren’t even dating for a year and couple of months and he was going to get THAT many more!!! What he got was the mother and father Ki-rin, mother and baby emerald oriental dragons, and mother and baby peacock oriental dragons! There was a limited edition with certificate wizard that we were wondering if we should get, but didn’t 🙁 I try not to be a greedy person and I felt that getting that wizard would be like taking him from somebody else in line that was waiting to get him. I regret not getting him. Oh well.

Fast forward to fall of 2010. My husband friend and I visit LA and go to the famous Farmers Market. In the window of one of the many awesome shops there were a bunch of retired Windstone sculptures! I could believe it! Eggs with dinosaurs and dragons! But there was one that caught my eye. My favorite dinosaur since forever; the stegosaurus. It was the baby stegosaurus. I didn’t have to think on it, I got it right away… validating my parking in the process 😀

So that’s my story and now I’m here.