At the weekend I was lucky enough to be able to return once again to where it all started: Elstree Studios in Borehamwood just 11 miles from home.

This was a troop at ElstreeCon 2.0 in aid of The National Autism Society. Whilst small this was an enjoyable event with a few actors and actresses in attendance.

In the afternoon we were lucky enough to be escorted onto the studio lot, past active sets, to the George Lucas Stage for a few photos!

Image by Wayne Allen (TK 52517)

Left to Right : Declan Baker (TI 9845), Dan Branton (TK 42911), Adam Knapp, (TK 11780) Chris Pearson (TK 10911)

A full write up is available on my Troop log on FISD.

One of the more fun things the members of the 501st legion do is create trading cards of themselves in costume. These are available though various channels such as the Detachments (who manage specific costumes) as well as Garrisons (who manage specific geographical areas).

After joining and making a few friends I was given several of these, and some people include them in sales. Sometimes you get one, others 2 with one signed by the member. I soon needed a folder to keep them all.

This year I finally arranged to get my own set made. I went with ordering them through my Garrison as they personalise them to me more. It took me far too long to organise this but I am very happy I eventually managed it.

My cards now take pride of place in the front of my collection.

If any 501st member would like a pair for themselves, please feel free to contact me using the social media links on this site and I’ll send you some.

So, I’ve been selling a few 3D printed prop parts on Shapeways since Rogue One was released in 2016. The store was named Suitcase Props, a play on my long time screen name.

What I never did though, was any branding at all. Being named after luggage didn’t give me any instant ideas and so I left it. I did think about recruiting a proper designer or maybe asking a friend to help but I just didn’t have any ideas for a long time.

Recently however, I had a bit of inspiration and spent some time in Inkscape iterating on the design.

The end result is a simplified suitcase, I’d found more realistic ones never worked in the past. The wordmark was the result of some time hunting on dafont for a futuristic font. I took this and then joined the S and P to give a more stylised look.

For times when the full logo is a bit much or I want something small I also created an icon styled logo isolating just the wordmark.

One of my goals for 2018 is to get back into my photography. For assorted reasons, I’ve not really used my DSLR kit for about 2.5-3 years now. The last serious use was when I went to Skomer in Wales to photograph puffins in 2015. I’ll try and write a short post on that in the near future.

As part of the process of re-educating myself about my past journey I have re-loaded all my old posts from my previous Wordpress blog and updated all the images and links to work again. I did do some minor spellchecking, grammar edits and removed some dead links, but for the most part these are all as written.

If you want to read the posts either head to the Archive or the first post is a review of the Optech sling strap.

A week or so ago I got an email from Apple asking me to renew my Developer account for another year, I declined. The renewal cost is non-trivial and right now I cannot justify the cost.

This essentially means as of Jan 27th, 2017 TKVoice will die.