Hey folks,

I have kind of a good news/bad news/good news sandwich for you today I'm afraid! 😅
It's a bit of a long one but it's important so please do skim through!

First the Good News: the Blue Lobster patches arrived and they turned out AWESOME! 🥳 Check them out:

Now the Bad News: delays. 😭
I have been working with the same manufacturer who made my Horses of the Apocalypse pins on the Warped Ocean collection from January to March and all seemed well until last week when they unexpectedly told me they can't produce these pins at this level of detail at all and cancelled my order, even though they already made moulds! 😱

Now don't panic, more Good News: the pins ARE going to be made; it's just going to take a little longer as I've had to start all over again with my other regular manufacturer. 💪 I'm confident this manufaturer won't let me down as they are the ones who produced my extremely detailed Kelpie pin:


But to be extra sure these pins will look their best I decided to do some further work on the pin designs myself before ordering them from this manufacturer. These mainly come down to simplifying some pattern elements or converting parts of them to screen-print, and increasing the size of the 1" pins to 1.5".

Here's a walk-through on the edits I've made, which I'm confident have actually improved the designs and I hope you'll agree!

The Lobster:

The patterns and eyes on the Lobsters body came out way too small in the test mould and even if filled I suspected they would have a high error rate so I decided to simplify those shapes somewhat.

The Crab:

In this case I didn't feel I could keep the essense of the design by enlarging all the circle-texture-details so I decided to replace thise parts with screenprint; in red on the gold-plated crab, and in blue on the rainbow-plated crab.
I think the screenprint provides a much cleaner look and you can see from the image above that the overall appearance hasn't changed much from the original intention.

The Oarfish:

The Oarfish also has a pattern detail issue. Those coloured shapes on the body are just incredibly tiny once moulded so I've also switched these to screenprint for a cleaner look.
There will be one layer of green screenprint on the gold-plated pin and three layers of screenprint on the rainbow-plated pin in green, blue and pink.

The Octopus:

I haven't had to add screenprint to the Octopus, instead I've managed to clean up the outlines and create larger spaces which hopefully can all be filled with enamel. I think this design also looks better post-edit so I'm looking on the bright side here lol!

The Mini Pins:

Although these were potentially doable at 1" I was concerned the tiny bits on the starfish wouldn't work out well so I decided to just increase these to 1.5" in size to avoid any further potential issues holding up the process. I hope you folks don't mind the upgrade!

Mandarinfish:
This pin will have no noticeable changes to the design itself but some of the finer detail elements have now been combined into the blue screenprint element this design already had.

Unfortunately the manufacturing issues mean that production and fulfillment for pin backers will now be delayed. I will update you again when I get more information from my new order but I suspect pin orders will now be fulfilled in June.

I apologise for the delay. I will know in future what level of detail I can achieve in enamel vs screenprint and hopefully avoid this problem for later projects.

If you only ordered a patch or stickers I will be packing your orders next week once the last of the stickers have arrived.

Now, some of you may be familiar with pin techniques and have realised that I'm going to have to make another minor change; because the rainbow-plated pins have to be soft-enamel they will now need to have clear epoxy added over the enamel colours to create a flat surface to be screenprinted onto.

I know that some people actually prefer for their soft-enamel pins to have this effect but I wanted to keep you folks in the loop and help me to decide:
 
1) Should I add epoxy only to the pins that now need screenprint on soft-enamel ;the Crab, Oarfish and Mandarinfish? (And leave the other rainbow-plated pins as regular indented soft-enamel.)
OR/
 2) Add clear epoxy to ALL the rainbow-plated pins so that they have a uniform appearance? (So that they all have a flat, smooth surface)

Some points to consider:
- Adding epoxy to all pins will slightly increase the production time
- It also may lead to an increase in seconded pins due to extra opportunity for trapping dust etc (but I only send grade A pins to backers so that should only be an issue if the % is very high)
- In some cases people think it can dull the rainbow-plated colours a little

Here are some photos of some of my friend Holoraindrops pins with epoxy vs no epoxy so you can see what the difference in effect is:


Please let me know what you would prefer via the poll below, and feel free to ask questions about the changes or process!

Thank you for reading to the end of this long-ass Update! 

All the best,

Abi