Hope everyone is doing well and enjoying their summer!

I just got home from a week-long art workshop in Milwaukee that was really incredible. It refueled my spirits a lot to be around other creative people and see so many amazing artists in person for the week. This year has been a lot of difficult but useful work to deal with long-standing problems, and though it has all been needed and good work, it did drain my spirits a lot - to the point that I wondered about whether I had the stamina to keep being a professional artist. But this last week definitely helped recharge my sense of purpose and love for what I do. So that has been a very positive, uplifting experience and I am excited to be making progress on everything, and what the future may hold.

And, I wanted to give you guys a quick update on how everything is progressing -- which is very well!

All of the vectors are finished and ready to go. They all look beautiful and the vector artist I work with did such a great job making sure everything is set up nicely for being made into metal and enamel pieces. She has a much better understanding of scale than I do, so her help with these is always invaluable and they turned out lovely.

*As requested in the comment below, I am adding in here the previews from her vector files so you guys can see how lovely they turned out and how subtle the changes were :) Mostly it was just pushing a few lines over by a mm or two to make sure there was room for enamel or cutouts. Also, don't worry too much about the coloring of these as these were just her approximations of the Pantone enamel and gold metal (same as mine were approximations of the Pantone enamel and gold metal), and they will inevitably look slightly different in real life in actual metal and enamel.

I also have everything set up with the manufacturer, who is ready to make the pins. The manufacturer has suggested I collect the surveys first before finalizing the order to make sure we get the quantities right, as they say it will not be easy to increase the quantity once production starts.

So I've spent a lot of this week working on getting the surveys and pledgemanager setup properly - and I'm just about finished - just putting the final touches on it done today and sending it to BackerKit for review. My goal is to have the surveys ready to go next week. :)

So please keep an eye out for those next week so we can get a good count on everything and get the pins ordered. I'm so excited to be rounding the final lap on these and be able to get them to you guys hopefully soon. 

In other news, I ended up getting accepted into GenCon this last week - which I'm super excited about :) I will have a vender booth - so if any of you are planning to go to GenCon, stop by and say hi! I'd love to see you there. And my hope is, if everything goes smoothly with the surveys, to have everything ordered before I leave for Gencon, so they can be getting made while I am away. And then I can do fulfillment afterwards. 

Anyways, that's all the news for now :) I'm going to get back to work on the surveys lol and I will post an update when they start going out as well. Love you guys! 🖤