Sandn'Sea had some nice cats. I am curious about your blue/lilac program. It seems that 30 years ago people who wanted to breed lilacs had a blue and lilac program, and nowadays people who want to breed lilacs have a chocolate and lilac program. Were blues just more popular back then? Or is there some advantage to combining blues and lilacs v. Chocolates and lilacs?
It was the "received wisdom" at the time that mixing chocolates and blues was not a good idea. The idea was that putting the seal gene into the mix by having the chocolates in the breeding program might "muddy" the tone of the blue gene. Genetics isn't like simple math, recessives aren't always totally recessive, and it was thought that some of the seal coloring might give the blues a brownish cast instead of the desired slate blue. I can vouch for this, because one of my current cats is almost exclusively blue and lilac breeding, and his coat is the true straight blue, while the other has a lot of seal and chocolate in her pedigree and her tone is indeed more brownish than the other cat's. (Obviously, it wouldn't affect the lilacs one way or the other since they're two doses of double recessives . . .) I'm sure the reasoning behind breeding chocolates and lilacs is that then you have a better chance of getting the "dilute" gene in 100 percent of every litter.
The goal at that time was to breed "true blue" and lilac only in five generations. My old Blue queen was 100 percent BP until you got back to the fourth generation, where there was ONE chocolate and ONE lilac. (I just went digging in my old files and found out that she had Blue-Iris back of her as well in the sixth generation - I had forgotten but that's probably why I bought her. She was my first cat after we got married and that bloodline was a strong recommendation. She was a bit undersized with a bad nose break, but she was one of those cats that throws kittens superior to herself.) My Lilac girl was about 3/4 Lilac once you got back 5 generations (it was a little harder to stick to that hard and fast rule with Lilacs as rare as they were then.)
I'm very interested in the theory about the difference in body markings between the various underlying tabby patterns. I did always check for "ghost" markings on my kittens before they shed their kitten coat, but again the "received wisdom" was that the cats with the dirty-looking kitten coats had the clearest coats as adults. So I don't know.