I ended up scrapping the previous St Sebastian pin idea and going back to my original idea of making a second Bottle Demon pin– worked out much easier this time.
I have an extremely hard time making merch without knowing the final materials ahead of time- I can’t just create a design and slap it on something, it has to be bespoke. It makes coming up with merch difficult, but I’m generally against needless production of tchotchkes anyway… I can’t be one of those people who makes 5,000 keychains/stickers/pen bags/etc. Not to rag on people who do that, though- we’re all scrambling to appease the ravenous beast known as capitalism, so I get it! It’s just not something I can get behind, creatively or socially.
Aaaanyway, I’ll work on this design further in the week to come and probably open preorders pretty soon, similar to last year’s pin run. I’ll probably use the same materials/style (gold die struck) as last time, and then do a second special colorway in (most likely) copper. (I originally wanted to use black nickel, but after doing some reading on how bad nickle is for the environment it felt a little hypocritical to go through with that while also decrying the overproduction of merch… Gold is also pretty bad so I don’t want to contribute any further to that. Whoops.)