March Designs & Happenings!

Good evening, everyone!

I hope all has been well for you! I’ve had a busy beginning of March, but I guess when am I not busy—though I promise I am trying really hard to give myself time to rest, recharge, and create for fun! Anyway, I wanted to give you all the finalized vectors for March, as well as passwords for this month.

March’s Secret Shop & Updates password is: RECHARGE100

the combined shipping code is: ISHIPIT

Please feel free to use that code if you have a physical product tier only. As always, if you don’t use the code I’ll assume you wanted your order shipped out right away instead of waiting to combine with your next club box.

I like to put this reminder occasionally as probably at least once or twice per box shipments I get emails saying the shipment was sent to their old address. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when you change your address, even if you changed it on the back end of your profile, I have no way of knowing your address changed in order to update any current labels unless you tell me. The way the shopify/ShipStation system works is when you’re charged at the beginning of the month, Shopify notifies Shipstation of your order and a label is automatically created. So let’s say you had sub payment for November through January. You move in the middle of January, and while you update your profile on our site with your new address, it only will create a label with the new address on the next charge in February. That means all the labels that ShipStation has from Nov-Jan are your old address. By the time I go to ship your box (depending which designs came in), I most likely am using labels from the months you’re waiting on, so I won’t know your address changed unless you specifically tell me so I can manually update your shipping labels. So please, do let me know via email that you need to update your address so I can ensure you get your box!

First up, we have the cute rats. I loved both designs, so we decided we will pin them both. I’ll be allowing pin club members for Moujuu to decide which pin they want, the super Kawaii one or the cool, more ukiyo e one! Both are holding a houju, which I’ve mentioned before is a precious jewel that purifies in Buddhism. It’s what the dragon balls in Dragon Ball are supposed to represent as dragons are protectors of these sacred jewels as are gods, etc. We have used houju and flames as a constant theme in our traditional designs for years. As a bonus for this month’s subscribers, we are also including a single houju board filler pin.

For Pretty Winkers: SG I went a little extra for Ursula. But I figured why not, I love her and she’s going to be a one-and-done lower LE design. I chose Ursula because she is a confident artist and it’s my beloved Taka’s birthday month, also a confident artist! Ursula’s design features a background partially inspired by her painting in the movie, as well as her cabin in the woods. At the very bottom by her arm, that little sliver of brown represents the base of her canvas as the background painting. I did swap where the reddish-pinkish-orangey moon is from the painting for balance, but it is a tip off to her painting. I plan on making the moon translucent enamel as I tend to do with designs with moons. The background will be glittery!

Well, I know no one asked for it, but Tiger’s Eye is well, fabulous and flashy and way more handsome than he ought to be. and yet, surprisingly, I only used two screen prints for his design, but those two colors pack a lot of punch in making him seem really alive!

Ami’s design is look it so mature and refined! She looks like she’s finally ready to say yes to a date with Ryuichi! Although the colors don’t seem so crazy, this design has 18+ colors to create contrast in the background! there will be a limited manga variant for all these, though I’ll be bumping the LE from 50 to 30. This variant will have a more night time feeling to it as well.

All the remaining lunar new year pins, stickers, washi, etc are on their way to me and should be here his week, which is great news because that means I can finally drop that collection in the shop after fulfilling the KS for it. No new updates from the main manu, but I’ll be bugging him today for an update as I imagine January is all wrapped up at least.

Finally, just for fun, I took Taka to a risograph class yesterday, hence the later March update today instead of when I intended yesterday. Taka wasn’t particularly interested in taking the class, but I had signed us both up for it months ago. Taka is really quite a homebody and fairly anti-social.

He usually is pretty meh about things I tell him we’re gonna go do (see above meme of Bob from Bob's Burgers), but literally every time he’s like “oh that was a lot better than I expected.” I’m always like “of course it was! I’m not gonna drag you to go do something you hate!” Anyway, yesterday, Taka not only enjoyed the class, he couldn’t stop raving about how excited he was to learn a new medium and how he felt so inspired to create new designs for the future, which is perfect because I want to put more efforts into creating art prints this year. I knew risograph would appeal to Taka because I consider it like a lazy man’s version of ukiyo e. It still requires work, master screens for each color and some manual effort, and always a chance for misalignment, so print runs are limited and there’s still some handmade aspect to the craft. But it is way easier than wood block, linocut or lithography print making.

Here’s a little peek of what we created for our first class. We both revisited some old designs of ours but still had to redraw them for the class in order to separate colors. I hope you all like them and are interested in seeing more print work from us this year! We are both already planning to book a work session in the studio we took the class at so we can do our first run of designs later this month.

Oh, before I forget, just a reminder that tomorrow is the drop for all the extras! Many have very few collector grades left. Below is the non-IP/English names they’ll be listed as as well as other drops:

Bubble Princess = Princess Mercury

 Silver Moon Queen = Queen Serenity

Resentful Regent = Queen Beryl

Illusion Master = Jadeite

Astrological Socialite = Nephrite

Sassy Soldier = Zoisite

Crimson Light = Star Fighter

Emerald Light = Star Healer

Sapphire Light = Star Maker

Lotus (all variants finally available)

Kiku = Chrysanthemum

Kuchinashi = Gardenia

Oni : New pink, black and green variants available

Koinobori: New orange variant available

Ume to Mejiro: Restock & Suzume (sparrow variant) available

Kiyohime & Anchin Sticker Sheets

Spider Lily Sticker Sheets

Chrysanthemum Sticker Sheets

Drop is at 4pm PST/7pm EST. Now I’m off to continue taking aesthetic pics of all the designs and final inventory counts so I’m ready for tomorrow’s drop! If y’all have questions, as always, just feel free to reach out!

- Mandy & Taka