Hello everybody!   Thank you for your patience as we navigated through various difficult circumstances, which I'll detail below. First, the good news:

The survey is done!   

That said, we had a lot of uncertainties and difficulties to navigate the last couple months. It was my instinct to wait until we had solved problems to update, because when I'm getting news, my anxiety prefers to hear a plan later than an unknown sooner.  However, that may have been a mistake, as I understand some folks were worried we disappeared.  I'll keep that in mind in the future, and apologize for not posting sooner.

 If you're intersted in all the challenges we tackled, keep reading!   If not, just scroll to the bottom to see a pic of one of the finished pins!

In early December I began to have some frequent and severe headaches at the back of my head. It was debilitating, and often made working impossible.  Every time I worked for an hour or two, I'd get a headache that'd take me out of comission for the rest of the day.  As a cancer survivor, it also meant I needed to get an MRI to see if it was a recurrence before making a treatment plan. While I'm grateful it was just an overuse injury, my ability to work was still quite limited until I could find a decent physical therapist and make some headway on healing. PT and a standing desk is finally helping some, so I finally finished the survey.

Some of the work I did during this time was to try to figure out what tariffs were landing on pins (28% to be paid by us, the importer), and troubleshoot how to mitigate the unexpected expense without charging y'all more shipping & handling than originally outlined.  Even though this project reached a size where we planned to hire White Squirrel for all of fulfillment, we will instead be hiring a friend to help us get through some of the orders here at home.  It would save the most money if we mailed alone, but Red is fast-tracking their gender-confirming hysterectomy because of the political climate.  They'll be recovering throughout the month of June, and our good friend Cat will take up mailing whatever isn't mailed already at that time.

I know that the last few months have probably been stressful for a lot of our backers as well, from watching transphobic EOs cause confusion in schools and hospitals, to the dismanteling of the federal government, to the anti-DEI changes from flakey tech giants.  However, we're going to persist in making queer art year-round.  We want our pins to continue to help folks express pride, find community, and identify safe spaces in ways that get past bigoted radars.  Thank you so much for supporting us in that effort, and again, for your patience as we tackled the last few months.