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Cute Sushi Animal Enamel Pin Badges

Zooshi Sushi Animal Enamel Pins

The new enamel pins are here! They’re a series of sushi animal pins, featuring cute animals in sushi, called Zooshi. They make lovely small gifts or stocking fillers for fans of Japan and kawaii things. They’re available in the shop now, along with my other cute pins:

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Rough Sketches

Here are my initial rough sketches and ideas for the sushi animals. My initial ideas are always like this – tiny, scribbly doodles in my sketchbook – nothing fancy, just exploring ideas and getting them down on paper.

You can see some other ideas for sushi animals: duck gunkan, catamaki, dragon roll and shark nigiri. Maybe some of them will be pins in future (let me know if any of them catch your eye!).

Sushi animals

Zooshi

At first I was going to call the series Sushi Friends, but then I came up with a better name: Zooshi! I designed a cute logo for the series, and drew up some of the animals in Adobe Illustrator. I’d love to do more with them and develop the series in future.

Zooshi designs

Alpaca Maki Enamel Pin Badge

And here’s the first of the two new pins: Alpaca Maki! A lilac alpaca snugly wrapped up in a sushi roll. Such a tiny pin – it’s always great seeing them finished after working on them on screen, picking colours and adjusting all the tiny details.

Now sold out.

Alpaca sushi enamel pin badge


Hamster Temaki Enamel Pin Badge

As you may know, hamsters are my favourite – I just think they’re the cutest of the cute. A temaki is a hand roll. They’re really easy to make – just take half a sheet of nori in your hand, add a small scoop of rice, pile on some fillings and roll it into a cone. I really like Yo Sushi’s vegetable hand roll – it has tamago egg, tofu and mayo to make it satisfying and juicy.

Anyway, here’s my hamster temaki – a little hamu peeking out of a sushi cone, with carrot, cucumber and pepper. The details are really tiny – it looks so cute!

Hamster temaki is available in the shop for £5 (worldwide shipping).

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Hamster temaki pin


Hedgehog Nigiri Enamel Pin Badge

The other pin in the series is Hedgehog Nigiri, who you already know! He’s the most popular of the pins so far – a little hedgehog perched on a ball of sushi rice with a strip of nori seaweed holding him snugly in place.

Hedgehog nigiri is available in the shop for £5 (worldwide shipping).

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Hedgehog Sushi Enamel Pin Badge


How I Designed the Enamel Pins

If you’d like to see more of how I designed my pins, I made a video about the process when I launched my first three pins Hedgehog Sushi, Cherry Cats (now sold out) and Pegasaurus (now also sold out!):