We’ve been keeping a secret.  And well, because we’ve been outed by a couple of people, we figured we’d break down and do a little mini-announcement here to all four of our blog readers. ;)

Earlier this year, Eric and I went out for coffee at our local Tim Horton’s.  (That’s not the secret).

It was a Sunday and we’d gotten the paper and we were thoroughly depressed after reading this horrific account in the Citizen about kids in Africa who were soldiers of war and others who had to resort to unbelievable things just to feed their siblings.  Here we were, having our cushy life of being warm and fed and generally free from the really huge worries (like war) in life, and if everything goes as it should, it would point to our son Jack leading the same sort of comfortable life as he grows up — a stark contrast to what the kids in the newspaper story would be facing, if they even get to grow up.

So we started thinking. (That’s not the secret either).

What if anything can we do?  We’re designers, not doctors/social workers or other more immediately helpful professionals.  It’s really hard to save the world with a really great piece of jewelry or an illustration!  Or is it?

While having this discussion at the Timmy’s, our little monster was being pretty rambunctious, and it was the line of thought above and our own little monster that lead to this: Metal for Monsters.

Neither of us are really fabulous illustrators.  But — we love the work of some really fabulous illustrators.

These illustrators:

S.britt, Stefan G. Bucher, Jon Burgerman, Anna Chambers, Justin Hillgrove, Adam Koford, John Martz, Jay Stephens and Brian Taylor have kindly agreed to collaborate with us and have supplied us with some really really cool monster art.

Together, we’ll be offering stainless steel pendants that have their awesome illustrations in limited editions of 100 of each pendant. (Both Eric and I have made our own monster illustrations for Metal for Monsters, but they’re not up yet!)

And while the illustrations are really cool, what’s cooler is that a good chunk of the sale of each pendant will go directly to UNICEF as our way of trying to help kids that don’t have it nearly as well as we do here.

So here’s a preview as to what they look like:

We don’t have an official launch-date yet because we’re still ironing out some matters of production.  But, if you’d like to be on the notification list of when they’ll officially be on sale, join the newsletter.  Our goal is to raise as much money as possible for UNICEF, so pass on the Metal for Monsters site to anyone who loves monsters or wants to help raise money for UNICEF!