26/1: New pins spotted at the pin meet

At Saturday's pin meet, Honav supplied some frames of pins displaying forthcoming designs that hadn't been seen before. On one particular frame, there were some pins which caught my eye.

There were two logo pins in metal which were stunning. One in frosted gold and one in frosted silver. Possibly the best form of the logo pin I've seen to date. The gold one was marked 'Olympic Torch Relay'.  There was no clue as to whether these would be retail pins or restricted to a small group of people.

The other logo pin used the torch infill seen in some of the original torch relay promotional material. Again an excellent looking pin, but no idea of availability.

Then there were a series of mascot pins. The first, carrying on the torch theme, was Wenlock running with the Olympic torch. He's dressed in a white shirt with a 2012 logo on it and a pair of white shorts. Maybe it's his legs, or maybe the shorts are long, but to me there's a feeling of a 1948 character with a 2012 torch. That's not a criticism, I think it looks fantastic. Once again I've changed my mind and I have a new favourite pin. I sincerely hope this one is retail.

Next we have 2 metallic Wenlocks. Again, gold and silver have been used as the key colours. This time the mascot is all one colour - including his logo and bracelets. Once again, no clue as to whether we're looking at retail pins or not.

Not to be outdone, Mandeville has 'blinged-up', and comes in both the traditional and Union flag colours but this time with a sparkle effect. I sense these two are retail pins.

The final two pins are most definitely retail in may opinion. They come from a set of cockney rhyming slang pins. As a Londoner, I normally cringe at this sort of thing and have flash backs to Dick van Dyke and Mary Poppins, but the designers have dodged that bullet with excellent ideas and humour. For example, the slang for telephone - 'Dog and Bone' shows a dog using a bone as a phone. Ok, not side splitting, but a clever idea in my opinion.

So, a small flavour of what might be coming. The usual caveats apply to these sort of sneak-peeks, in that not all the pins may go into production etc, and if they do, who knows if they will be generally available. However on the plus side, every one of these pins were on a board with retail pins which have already seen the light of day, so there's hope.