I am absolutely delighted by how excited everyone is for this paper, so we are totally going to do kits.

I honestly expected the vibe to be either ‘eh, nah, not for me’ (which cool, no problem) or ‘how very very very dare you charge enough to both pay for your supplies and for postage and pay anyone who helps you a decent wage for their work and pay yourself a decent wage for your time’. But instead everyone was delightful and excited and absolutely no one on instagram told me I was a monster. So now we’re going to do the thing!

I need to keep this simple and streamlined if I’m going to pull it off, so:

• We are doing this on patreon. The stars started out as being just for folks there, so it feels only fair that they get first dibs on kits, and it keeps everything manageable on my end.
• We are doing this as a preorder, and we are only doing a limited number of kits. That lets me order only the supplies I need, and it makes sure I can find enough of the fancy paper to get everyone taken care of.
• There are only going to be two options I’ll have a kit that makes 6 stars, and a kit that makes 12 stars, because that’s all I can handle from a logistics standpoint right now.
• I can only ship to US addresses Overseas shipping costs a fortune, takes forever, and has a much higher rate of packages getting lost, and I can’t handle that right now.

Now, if everything goes well this year, I will likely do a grander version of this next year, and some of those things may change. But this year, I’m keeping it simple.

So here’s what I’m going to do:

• At some point in the next few days, I’ll create two new tiers on Patreon, one for folks who want 6 stars, one for folks who want 12 stars.
• There will be a limited number of spots, likely 20 on each tier.
• I’m going to price those first two tiers slightly lower to start, just sort of as an early bird special for folks brave enough to go on this roller coaster ride with me.
• When those two tiers go live, I’ll only post about it on patreon, and I’ll send that post to anyone with a free or paid patreon membership. I won’t say anything about the tiers being open on instagram/the blog/ravelry/the mailing list until 24 hours after I post about them there. Because judging from the comments on the instagram post where I asked about kits, I suspect there may more people who want them than I can reasonably manage to make. And I haven’t even told the mailing list yet. And I want folks on patreon to have first dibs.
• If there are still early bird spots left after 24 hours, I’ll share them publicly.
• If there aren’t spots left, I’ll add another set of tiers, also with limited spots, but with regular pricing and start letting folks know they’re available.
• I’ll keep increasing the spots on that tier gradually, (so I can make sure I’ll be able to handle getting everything shipped and so that I’m confident I can find the paper,) until we get to the point where I say I can’t do any more and close them down. I suspect I’ll do less than 300 of these, just because any more that that feels daunting. I expect the tiers to stay open for less than a week, possibly just a couple days if folks are really speedy.

Here’s what to look for next:

• Some time very soon (almost certainly tomorrow), I’ll do A Giant Public Post on patreon and on the blog and on ravelry (and a shortened version on insta) and with aaaaaaalllllllllll the info I can imagine anyone will want on how this works. I’ll talk about what will be in the kits, when they’ll ship, what they’ll cost, how doing this on patreon will work, and anything else that comes to mind that I think folks might have questions about.
• I’ll also remind folks that I have a fair amount of practice doing things like this (with books, rather than kits, but the process is much the same), just in case anyone is nervous.
• Then some time late this week (maybe Thursday, maybe Friday), I’ll open the early bird tiers and do a patreon post letting anyone with a membership here know about them.
• From there, we see how it goes! Maybe no one actually orders them, maybe I get enough folks that I have to shut it down in a couple of hours. That bit is always the stressful part…I may need hot chocolate.
• Once the preorder ends, I’ll order all the stuff and settle in for some quality assembly line time with a good audiobook ready to hand!

So that’s the general idea. Like I said I’m doing a ‘HERE IS ALL THE INFO I CAN REASONABLY THINK ANYONE ANYWHERE WILL WANT ABOUT THIS’ post coming shortly (translation, it is not all in this post), but if you have any particular questions you think you’ll want answered there, send them my way!