In case any of you were on the fence about our second product, Skallops, you should make up your mind soon, because there's only 60 hours left in the Kickstarter funding period!

Also, we made a really cool stop-motion (omgIcan'tbelievewespentthatmuchtimetakingphotos) video for the Skallops project yesterday.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

First, some notes:

• If you've got a metal-frame or Persian trebuchet - Some of these kits made it out without the printed instructions inside their boxes. My apologies, that's directly my fault. In the late nights before I left for home and family on Christmas Eve, some of the kits got packed incorrectly. If you're missing the intsructions, no sweat, though. You can download them here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13310066/final/instructions-sheets.5.pdf
• If you were one of our $250-level backers - We'll be emailing you directly in January to talk about the engraved images and to schedule the dinner. We want to do a big banquet-style dinner with all of our backers at this level, and we'll be figuring out the timing for that once we're back from the holidays.

We're closing in on the end up the backer rewards! The last week and a half were, and there's no other way to put this, grueling. It was worth it, though. All of the regular trebuchets have gone out. All of the metal-frame and Persian collector's editions have gone out, too. The only thing left is the 49 timber-style collector's edition trebuchettes. Those ended up being a little trickier than we expected.

In the end, we were on track to have the timber-style trebuchettes done before Christmas too, but we ran into some problems with the printer drivers that run our laser. If you know anything about .svg files, the drivers have a condition where sometimes, depending on how complicated the file is, the laser will randomly stop on nodes with retracted handles, or on nodes that are too close to other nodes, or on nodes that are too pointy, or on nodes that are too smooth, or on nodes that smell funny, or on nodes that look a little crooked, or... you get the pattern. In any case, pretty much the only way to deal with those problems is to run the file, see where the laser stops, fix it, then run the file again and see where it stops the second time, and so on. With a file that takes 30-45 minutes to run, this process is, imaginably, tedious, and it caused enough delays to stop us from finishing the timber-style collector's edition trebuchettes before I left for LA for the holidays on Christmas Eve. Those'll just have to go out when Evan gets back into the workshop on the 29th.

Finally, with all of these rewards shipped out, or shipping out shortly (in the case of the timber-style trebuchettes), I've got a few words on what happens next. We'll, of course, be posting further backer updates into 2012 as our education outreach efforts kick in. I'm really looking forward to those.

And for all of you who've asked what's next: stay tuned. We've got a second product in the pipeline. It's fantastic. It's amazing. In our playtesting, it's been beloved by the young and young-at-heart alike. It'll blow your mind with the possibilities. If you stopped by our workshop to pick up your trebuchette, you've already gotten a sneak peak. For the rest of you, we'll be posting a couple more backer-only updates in the closing days of 2011 to give you all a taste of what's coming. And then, in the first few days of 2012, we'll be going live with it. So stay tuned and get excited!