the mini pins are done! I have some pics sent to me by the respective manufacturers. The larger pic of them turned out sorta blurry but i'm happy with how they turned out.

I've also received some in progress updates for the main pins and i think they're looking really nice! I'm choosing not to post them here because they look like kind of a mess in their half finished state and i don't want to give anyone a heart attack.
a small design update: by the manufacturer's suggestion, the eyes of the dragon pin and hooves of the unicorn have been changed to an unswirled pearl, while the horns remain swirled. If you don't know what this means, the eyes and hooves will have sort of a flat shimmer to them, they'll look a bit different to the horns. It was their suggestion that these spaces were too small for a swirled effect so the change was made.
also: the last of the stickers are in!

I have an enormous amount of "oops" stickers both on part of me and the printer. The first run the printer didn't follow my mask instructions correctly, then I sent the wrong gryphon art and THEN accidentally made itty bitty gryphon stickers when i didn't notice that their canada site was in cm and not inches. Thankfully everything is properly made and in hand now, some of you may get some overly glittery and itty bitty oops stickers in your orders as extras.

Shipping and tariff stuff!!
EU backers: i'm in the process of becoming GPSR compliant! I'll be ready by fulfillment and will be able to ship directly to you. This is great because Iella won't have to worry about doing it for me, you'll get direct tracking and i think most of you will be able to receive a refund of some amount on your shipping cost.

US customers: the reduction to 30% was a very welcome bit of news. I should be able to receive everything before it ends assuming nothing drastic changes again in short news.
the bad news is, it's not actually 30%, it's more like 40-45% and I cannot find an answer why. I did a test run for DDP on my end and it charged $6.27 in tariffs on a $15 item which is in the ballpark of 42% I also received an email from one of my manufacturers stating the same on their end- so it's not just a canada thing. Someone in the community here has reached out to the shipping provider to ask what the explanation is so I'll hopefully have a reason eventually but probably not a solution sadly.

I'm still mulling in my head how i want to proceed. It's a lot of cost to absorb but as i stated earlier I don't like twisting people's arms to pay exorbitant extra fees that weren't there in the first place. I've also heard that not every shipment is getting caught and having duties applied but i don't know if there's reasons for that which don't apply to my shipments (plus it's just a roulette wheel at that point.)
the 2 solutions I can think of are to: 
absorb the cost, open a ko-fi to take tips if anyone feels like pitching in for any amount of the tariff cost
I just send them and everyone crosses their fingers. I could even provide refunds to people who provide me images of them getting tariffed. 

I also need to look into what fees people are being charged because i've heard wind of USPS sticking on large handling fees to tariffed shipments. I might do a few test shipments with people I know before settling on a plan.

sorry for nothing decisive still, I hope you enjoyed the photos anyhow!
M

just a quick note that i'll be locking orders in 24 hours, so make sure you're happy with your choices. I meant to do it a few days ago but got carried away with some other obligations. One of them was getting everything in to the manufacturers, the pins have been proofed and approved and should hopefully be with me in about 2 months time :>
there's still about 8 people or so who need to fill out their forms. If you haven't yet please do ASAP or reach out to me if you need to cancel!

I went back and forth on posting this because it's not a great representative of the final product (will switch to matte black nickel and it's missing the silkscreen) but i just wanted to quickly share part of a Fire wyrm sample 1. because the colour isn't as dark red as I anticipated 2. I think it looks neat!

I sampled glitter as well as chameleon powder. I've never used chameleon powder before and the intent was to just test it out for future items, but to be honest I was a little unhappy with the glitter in the mane and was in love with the chameleon effect in the tail.

so! I will be moving forwards with chameleon powder on all the fire for the wyrm. I hope you like it as much as I do.
also, I don't know what's up with the blue in that one area. There's two very small knock-out areas in the fire that unfortunately were a little too small, so they'll be filled in with black in final

and surveys are live! finally!! Smoke test was pretty smooth, there's one person i need to catch up with, i think there was a payment mishap but seems to be all set up good
I got (most of) the fixed stickers in and added the images to the listings- you can see them here!

I would have ideally liked to have black shuck pin finalized before opening surveys but I think i'm already behind schedule enough- I've sent in an order to try out two more colours but I think it's close, it turns out the black nickel was actually a lot darker than it appeared in the photo

so i feel like it's close, the blue is just a little intense still, I'm trying it out with black fill and a darker/greyer one, both with and without sandblasting.
I'll probably push the schedule if i can. to give everyone more time to answer, by about 2-3 weeks or so? I'd like people to have time to see the final black shuck well before having to lock orders in.