Updates

very quick here:
Happy new year! I hope everyone had a great holiday break.
The last pins are here! I'm going to be locking addresses and charging cards very soon so please be on the lookout for that. If you need to cancel or alter your order for any reason please contact me ASAP because I want to get started right away with the goal to have everything out before feb (good lord I can't believe how horribly delayed this got).
Some of you have VERY large orders with a large addon that i'll be charging so heads up for that!
here are the photos of the final pin:

Lastly, there's some orders that still never filled their surveys. I don't know if there's a possibility any of you are reading this but i'll be doing a very long overdue cancellation of those tomorrow unless any of you reach out personally to object. I've had it set up to send reminders for months, but with everything ordered there's a chance I can't even fulfill them with what i have on hand at this point.

SO i have unfortunately multiple pieces of bad news and a little good news about shrike-
The bad news is it got is that I was warned that the black chrome was also not a great option for this colourway. With this, gunmetal, and army green being a no-go, that's basically every dark chrome colour out of the equation. I have to go with matte black nickel (Like the wyrm and black shuck pins)
What's been happening behind the scenes is black chrome happens to tint fill colours. This isn't a huge issue with midtone or dark colours but with the shrike colourway's light blues and greys everything yellows and pollutes into a swampy green. i had another round of samples made with black chrome to check this (i wasn't given details on how extreme it would be so I wanted to make sure it completely needed to be ruled out) and they were totally correct.

I'm bummed! I'm really sad i couldn't deliver a closer pin to the art for you guys but I think that's every avenue explored. I even tried to get another manufacturer to make it with army green, but i think a lot of them use the same plating facility because it was also unavailable. I think it's still a good looking pin (especially once the white printing is added) but this is where it stands now and it's what i'll be ordering.
If this alters your decision please let me know ASAP!! I"ll try to accommodate people as well as i can. I want to get the order in for these as soon as i possibly can so i want to gauge if i need to alter the order number or maybe even start up a second order of coffee coloured ones if people would like to switch. There's 38 of you so please get back to me if you want to change and i'll try to work out a system for altering orders and ensuring item counts.
Anyone who DIDN'T order shrike, your order should have been sent by now with the exception of 9 people who will go out very soon! those are the last of the stragglers who I ran out of crow pins for and most of you should have gotten an address confirmation the other week.
Thanks again for your enormous patience with this, and those of you who have gotten your items i hope you enjoy them!!
M 

so! biggest part of the update- I've received the second and final part of the pin order and will be slowly fulfilling orders through the next couple months. I tend to fulfill backerkit stuff at a glacial pace as it doesnt' import properly into the carriers I use so make sure your address is up to date now! There was news of more canadian tariffs by trump so I'm going to fulfill USA orders first to get ahead of anything that'll potentially affect them. 
some pin pictures-

lastly, some unfortunate news yet AGAIN with the shrike colourway, the colour I chose was not at all what i was expecting. The sample sheet (and even video that a friend showed me) made the replacement metal colour look like a very very dark gunmetal grey unfortunately what it ended up being was very very silver and mirror like

it's pretty cool, but not for this design.
I asked the manufacturer and apparently the initial colour i asked for is just not an option ever again moving forwards, so I'm going to have them done again, this time with the solid black chrome finish. I know how this one looks for sure as a friend of mine has used it herself

(thank you Izu/potentialforart!)
as usual if any of this sits poorly to you please reach out for refund, and check those addresses!! i'll be slowly going through charging cards and sending address locks so keep an eye open 

Some of the pins are in hand! specifically- Unicorn, dragon standard pins and eastern dragon, rat king, snail, and phoenix minis!
This means some fulfilllment is happening soon! If you order included these items and only these items please make sure that your address is up to date and you are ready to have your shipping/addon payment collected!
I'll start charging cards tomorrow and will begin locking addresses of these orders next week so please check that everything is up to date! If you're unable to have the payment charged at the moment please reach out!
For the time being i'll be covering the usa tariffs and i'll open a kofi if you'd like to contribute. After the most recent talks they're getting raised once more to 55% at some point in the near future so i'm eager to put the decision to bed and send out as fast as possible before then
A couple more notes-
I forgot to mention but I switched many of the designs from 2 backing to 3 given the size. this means if you ordered a 2-pack backing set you will get 3 locking backings! Sadly the black shuck and wyrm are limited to 2 because this was a decision i made after getting the samples, and the backings were part of the actual mould. I think the black shuck it works fine though i'm admittedly a little disappointed at the oversight of not adding 3 to the wyrm. He's kinda chunky.
Speaking of some disappointments- I got a last minute message last week from one of the manufacturers that the chrome i selected for the shrike gryphon colouration wasn't a possibility. The manufacturer ran out of some component to create that particular colour finish. This news was brought to me at nearly the very last stage of their production so I had to pick a new colour on the fly. Thankfully the chrome #20 seems to be very very close

from what i can tell it'll have a slighty warmer hue to it. I was really looking forward to the original colour because it has such a nice looking glossy finish to it, but i think this one should also work well. As usual, please let me know if you'd like to pull your order as a result of this.
finally, as i said a good chunk of the pins are now in my possession!! I went out today and had a little photo session, enjoy!

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