Pin Collection: Organized
My Christmas present from Andrle this year was a new setup for storing my pin collection. I’ve been collecting since family road trips since I was little, long before I was aware there was a whole community around pin trading (especially for Disney ones).
Mostly they reflect places I’ve been or events I’ve experienced. Pins from national parks, museums, that sort of thing. A lot of the fun of this gift was the organizing, as well as looking at and appreciating them all again. A few of my earlier acquisitions aren’t quite as high quality as more recent ones, as pins became more of a thing, but still a cool part of the whole.
For a few years now I’ve had some of the pins up on banners on the wall of my home office, but they were out of room for newer ones and were arranged more or less just by how the spacing worked. I also found that since it was part of the wall decor I kinda stopped seeing them after a while.
We found this great idea to use photo storage bins and cork board to make a bunch of much denser pin stores. Assembly was pretty straightforward, although cutting the thicker 12″x12″ cork down was harder than I thought (and resulted in a few slightly beveled edges). I might need a new blade.
The bigger challenge was deciding how best to group pins. Each 4″x6″ board could fit 15-20 pins depending on size. Some sets (like the one from backing the Star Trek: Voyager documentary) were more obvious, while other groups from past travel were harder. (Are zoos museums? Should cities and states be together?)
Now I have all of the pins grouped and mounted, with plenty of room for future collecting. Maybe I’ll do a labeled version of this someday…
We didn’t glue them down, and buttons are just loose for now, but I have them all otherwise mounted and stored.
I think I need to come up with a good way to display one or two sets at a time as a rotation on my office shelf. After all what’s the point of collecting if you can’t appreciate the items you collect and use them to retell stories?
