The mugs arrived! And I got mixed feelings

Yesterday, after months of waiting, the guinea pig mugs finally arrived! I've been anxiously waiting for these to come, sweating over all the delays, and now I can officially say everything is here. (The tea towels and tote bags also finally came a couple weeks ago too!)

The delivery was left by the curb and I had to carefully carry all the boxes down a flight of stairs into my basement studio. It was also raining so much and I was a little fearful of slipping. But with care, I finally got ALL of the boxes in!

I started opening the boxes to check them and the packaging came out SOO cute. I am so glad I made the mini versions of them ages ago because they came out exactly as I expected. The worst thing when making stuff is finding a small mistake on a huge batch of stuff (like a typo 👀). BUT these came out perfectly.

I'm also really proud of the packaging I chose for the inside of the boxes - each mug is carefully fitted with cardboard for protection during shipping meaning no plastic packaging at all.

I began checking through the mugs to make sure they came out as expected, and this is when I began to notice some problems. While most mugs were okay, I saw that many also had painting defects.

The nose on many of them are painted crooked or there were bumps/uneven areas. This has been a little disheartening since of course I expected them to all be perfectly painted, but at the same time I know that each of these is hand painted by *someone* even if not me - so there are bound to be some flaws.

I still need to check through them all, but overall I'm so happy that they're here! I'm excited to make my designs more accessible to more people AND it also gives me freedom to be more creative since I'll have more time to focus on new handmade ceramics.

This gives me a lot to think about for what I want to do in the future and this is where my mixed feelings come in since I feel like there's a clash between my handmade ceramics vs these outsourced mugs. I remember I had the same feeling though when I first outsourced my pins  because I used to hand paint every - single - one. So maybe it's just a matter of time? Or something like that. (More on this in a later post)

For now we can just be happy the mugs finally made it 😁 And for those of you wondering when they'll be available - it all depends on my ability to finish checking them all and cleaning my studio post-market. I may open for one weekend before my trip if I find the energy, otherwise it'll have to wait until February <3