Hey guys!! Thank you so much to everyone who's backed or shared the campaign so far! We're currently 49% funded and have one week left, so I'm hopeful we can meet the goal by April 1st!

I don't have much to update you on, but I wanted to share some of the earlier prototypes Melon & Pan went through before we came to the final samples.

This was the first pass at Melon, and it honestly was quite cute! The dark green embroidery needed to be changed badly, and I decided to remove the embroidery from the forehead as I felt it took away from his overall design (and kind of looked beat up).

I liked the overall shape of the second sample much better, but I still wasn't happy with the tail and the embroidery choices. We also tried the hair tuft going in a different direction for this sample, but I decided I didn't like that it covered too much of his melon stem!

At this point in the sampling process, I almost gave up because I felt like this was a step backwards in the overall design. The tail was perfect, but I ended up going back to the body of #2 for the final sample with some minor adjustments like more embroidery colour changes, removal of the forehead embroidery, and a fabric colour change for the melon stem!

The sampling process for Pan was thankfully a lot smoother as I'd started to get the hang of it!

The overall shape of this first pass was so silly I couldn't help but laugh at it! It was definitely a good jumping-off point, but I felt the material was too light, and they had mistaken part of my illustration as embroidery, as seen on the back seams.

This sample was so close to being perfect, but for some reason they had changed the inner ear embroidery to be a dark brown, so we changed this for the final sample as well as making the head a bit more round!

I always love seeing the behind-the-scenes processes of things like this, so I hope you all like this little peek behind the curtain too!

- Marnie