I just got back from a week up at Aspenhearted's studio where with the help of our friend Crys we inspected and graded over 5,000 individual pins and mounted them on their backing cards! Whew. A pretty intense task for a campaign this size, but really nice to see that only a tiny fraction of all the pins were considered "seconds" and not fit for shipping out. Here's a look at the naughty board where we housed the pins that had loose posts or flaws on the metal or the enamel.

Before I left we managed to pack up more than two-thirds of all the orders, and Carrie will be working on getting the rest shipped out over the next week.

When you get your pins, if you look on the reverse, the backstamp will show which pins were designed exclusively by me or by Carrie, and which ones we collaborated on together. We love working together, so if there's anything you might like to see from us in the future, please reach out and let us know!

Pins should be arriving in Carrie's studio within the week! Then begins the grading process. Each pin gets inspected by hand, ensuring that everything going out the door is the highest quality possible.

From April 25th to the end of the month, I'll be in Carrie's studio helping with any final grading and to pick, pack, and ship out orders. If you want to follow along as we work, Carrie and I will likely be sharing on Instagram (you can find us there as @kimkuzuri and @aspenhearted).

Not long before I head up to Washington for the big fulfillment extravaganza, our Pintopia 2024 campaigns will be wrapping up. Carrie's Just Say No has been blasting through its stretch goals, and my niche little project HEX! is over 600% funded!

Returning backers from Folkgore get free stickers on both of our projects. Folkgore backers can get a free "Don't Touch Me" snake sticker with Just Say No, and for those of you interested in HEX! I'm finalizing the design next week. Let me know which one you like more in the poll!

Below you're going to get some updates and some photos from the manufacturer, but first since I know y'all love that manananggal and this project traces its roots back to a Filipino horror zine, I wanted to share BALIKBAYAN a comics project I backed over on Kickstarter which is going into its final 24 hour stretch with only about 1500 USD left to fund! If you like horror and vibe with the cultural and diasporic roots of Folkgore, please go check it out and help it meet its goal! BALIKBAYAN features writer Jeff Estrella and artist Fabian Lelay.

Just take a look at this gorgeous art! Help BALIKBAYAN meet its goal.

Pin adjustments are done! Sharing with you all some photos from our manufacturer showing some of the minor adjustments we requested after we received the samples. For the manananggal in gunmetal, we swapped the setting of the blood drop charm to better match the metal of the pin and adjusted the length of the neck on the rokurokubi. I love the rokurokubi design a lot, but it was definitely tricky to anticipate how it would look in person. If I designed another pin like it in the future, I'd definitely mock up more of a physical prototype in the studio.

Estimated delivery to Carrie's studio is roughly one month from now (4/20 give or take a few days). Our fulfillment team (aka Carrie, myself, and our friend Crystal) are coordinating our schedules. If my request for time off from the day job is approved, we're aiming get together the last week in April to grade all the pins, get them on backing cards, and then pack each and every one of your rewards. I'll send out a reminder when that date is firm and we're looking to lock addresses.

Next up for us will be zine files going to the printer and then we go right into launching our next pin projects. Whew. Can't believe I'm prepping to do this all over again so soon, but we both got invited to be part of Pintopia 2024 here on BackerKit. If you haven't seen it, Carrie & Crystal Tea have a fun collection called Just Say No and I just sent out an email to about my project, HEX! which is letting me indulge my feelings about tabletop games and cute stuff.

Thanks again for all your support along the way for Folkgore. I'm going to be so thrilled to start sending these gorgeous pins out to you all.

-Kim

As we're waiting on the pin manufacturer to provide the requested changes, Carrie and I have been working on polishing up the mini-zine. We've got a draft laid out with a second round edit pass and proofs expected to be done in the week to come.

Here's a peek at some spreads, featuring my own art (final now versus what you saw during the campaign), and some contributing artwork by Emily Schnall (https://emilyschnall.com/), an illustrator and comic artist who does really some amazing creature and horror work. If you follow horror comics, you may have seen her work in the Dark Horse series Tales from Harrow County: Fair Folk.

Bringing the wordsmithing is writer Lor Gislason (https://lormaggot.ca/), author of Inside Out (Darklit Press) and the editor of Bound In Flesh: An Anthology of Trans Body Horror (Ghoulish Press). So thankful to have two awesome horror folks contributing to this project.

We're almost there!

So, what am I going to be up to after this? You may have noticed a bunch of amazing pin creators gearing up for Pintopia 2024 on BackerKit. I was invited to join, and I'll be doing something a little more cute than creepy. Here's a peek at my project if you want to check it out: 

Exciting news: samples of all the pins have arrived at Carrie’s studio! She had already received all the stickers, and has now inspected the pin samples thoroughly. We have some minor fixes and adjustments for the manufacturer to address–further lengthening the chain on the Rokurokubi, making sure the metal is recessed on a few places on the Sirena–but overall, they’re looking absolutely gorgeous in both the gold and the gunmetal. Here's a peek:

I’ve been really thankful for Carrie’s help and expertise throughout this project, but an extra shout-out for their involvement in making sure the pins are the premium item backers are expecting. I’ve known Carrie for a long time and while I never expected anything less than the best working with them, in helping fulfill her other campaigns I got to experience firsthand the care and high-standards for all the pieces going out from her studio.

We don’t have a firm timeline yet on our requested changes, but it’s clear that Lunar New Year celebrations will slow down our production a little more than I hoped. (Happy Year of the Dragon!) As always though, I’ll keep you all informed with how that looks in the weeks to come.

All but a few straggling surveys are in, so I’ll be locking orders later today and any additional pending charges will get processed shortly.

At the start of next week pins go into production. Meanwhile, all stickers and the bulk of our packaging needs have been ordered. At this time, depending on whether or not production gets slowed down by Lunar New Year, we expect to be shipping out your rewards in late February or early March.

While I'm here, let me signal boost Carrie's next pin project launching in a couple weeks here on BackerKit: Tidal Treasures!  If you liked the Sirena or have any merfolk pins, it's a beautiful set with some super fun accent pins so go sign up to get notified so you can score the super cute sticker sheet. Despite religiously watching the Monterey Bay Aquarium's ottercam, I gotta say, I love the octopus here so much.

Hi folks, a few production updates across our items:

Pins: The full set of design proofs we received from the manufacturer have been thoroughly reviewed and a few minor aspects clarified and adjusted. I've now signed off on the final proofs which means we are ready to move into production when we have a solid sense of how many pins to order for each design. We've gotten a majority of surveys back, but if you haven't filled out your survey yet or have been considering more add-ons, the sooner the better! It would be great to have a few more surveys in so we can be even more confident about our quantities.

Stickers: I received a reasonable quote for a lenticular sticker of the Kitsune design, so we're going to move forward on ordering that. If the quality once it arrives at Carrie's studio isn't what we're hoping for, we'll fall back to the same vinyl sticker style as the others and make a call ourselves whether we produce the fox version or lady version.

Zine: With pagecount in mind, most of the illustrations will be what are called "spot illustrations" and simpler images we can work the text around, but I'm doing some outreach to some other artists to see if I can wrangle a couple additional full page illustrations in a few different styles so I can free up more of my time to better prep for the fulfillment stage. I'm not sure if anything will come from this, especially with the holidays and such a tight deadline before going to print, but we'll see!

Other things on my to-do still during this stage are: finalizing the backing card design, researching some additional packaging options that build on what we learned last week in fulfilling Carrie's Nocturnal Nouveau collection, and once those final order counts are in, crunching some numbers to estimate how much of a bonus the contributors on this project can expect to receive thanks to all the backer support.

I'm excited to get these orders to the manufacturer, and hope you are too! Happy Holidays!

Thank you everyone for your patience! We finally sent out the “smoke test” surveys and caught a few little issues with shipping estimates and other minor things. We’ve resolved those and now the surveys will be going out to everyone.

I’m up in the PNW this week visiting Carrie’s studio and helping them grade and pack the pins from their Nocturnal Nouveau campaign. I’m learning a lot about how to spot manufacturing flaws and also thinking about how I can make the Folkgore backing cards look great with the variety of pins in this campaign.

I was also excited to see the display sample Carly created in person. It looks so good!

Pins testing the display space are from BackerKit creators who were in Pintopia earlier this year (and others)!

I’m more of a one-off pin collector myself and don’t really display them with a lot of intent. I think I collect figures and comics more often, although that’s such a space challenge for me when living in an apartment! To make this update a little more fun, here’s a poll. Let me know what you all like collecting and feel free to shout out your favorite indie creators in the comments!

PS - If you missed the campaign our pre-order store is now open. Backers got the big discounts but there are still some deals to be had and since I’m not a full-time artist this may be the only chance you’ll have to get these pins!