Sharing the Passion

Looking back on 25 years of the Disney Pin Trading Tradition, I’ve learned many things about pins that make me love them, not to mention the love I have for so many of my Pin Pals! Many of you know by now that I can talk all day about pins. I remember obscure info about pins like nothing else, largely because something about pins takes me to a place where nothing else matters.

There’s so much we collectors have in common, but the reasons we love what we love couldn’t be more varied and vast. That’s why it’s special when you find someone who shares your own particular passion. I’m lucky enough to collaborate with a couple of Pin Pals, Sarah and Elizabeth (aka @TheTwins), who share my fascination with obscure pin trivia. They’re site administrators on PinPics and very enthusiastic about sharing Pinformation with others.

Today, I’ve asked Sarah to share a story with you that she and her sister recently shared with me. 

It All Started with Belle
by Sarah Garcia

There’s no hobby quite like Disney pins. For a lot of us, it’s more of an addiction! My sister and I were latecomers in the grand scheme of trading, only diving in after a trip to Disney Springs in 2016. Who knew those pins we’d bought were meant to be more than souvenirs?! We tend to be pretty enthusiastic about our hobbies and interests, and pins are a passion that we now share with others. Consequently, this pin has now found its way onto our board!

The great thing about pins is the joy they can bring, whether you’re on vacation and trading (or buying), cataloging your collection online, trading by mail, or just socializing with other Pin Pals who enjoy the same hobby. After all, enjoyment naturally leads to enthusiasm. We made that step up during the COVID-19 shutdown. Not wanting a cloud to rain on our enjoyment, we joined an online group of traders and played a pin game that lasted about six weeks in the summer of 2020. That definitely carried our hobby into the realm of enthusiasm!

What I’d like to share here is how this hobby changed from enthusiasm to passion. Honestly, it came in the most unexpected way, thanks to Holland taking the time to share his “pinthusiasm”.

It all started two years ago . . . 

What a Difference a Pin Makes
Sometimes one moment can be life changing. The thing about life-changing moments is that we're rarely prepared for them. But, once they click, they're usually burned into the memory like a little twinkle light that never gives up. But it's not always a bright twinkle! (Ours was more of a soft glow in the beginning.) Mom, Sis and I had a great visit to Orlando in January 2020. We did a lot of pin trading at some of the WDW Resorts and Disney Springs, where Sis and I were loaded down with lanyards and spent a lot of time trading at Pin Traders. There was one particularly busy day, I remember, when a lot of people kept wanting to trade with us. The most memorable (for me) was a girl, in her late 20s or early 30s, wearing a great pair of Minnie ears. She hadn't been to Disney since she was young, and she'd brought some of her old pins to trade. Something on my lanyard appealed to her, because it was her boss' favorite character. She wanted to take it home as a "thank you", since he'd helped her work out time off for her vacation. While I don't remember the pin she wanted, I certainly remember the pin I got in exchange! It was this very early Belle head:

I was over the moon with this pin that really looked like Belle from the original animated film. Sis, on the other hand, was not impressed. Not only was Belle's skintone kind of off (in her words), but the pin was bowed from the center and must have been damaged at some time. Not letting this criticism dampen my excitement, I pocketed the pin and made sure it stayed in the keeper bag 'til we got home and I could put it in a special spot on my Beauty and the Beast board.

An Unlikely Beginning
Three years went by (throughout the COVID shutdowns), and we continued to enjoy our pins and trade via PinPics and other online groups. We didn't get to go back down to Orlando until March 2023, and by that time we were pretty anxious and hyped to do some in-person pin trading. As we were packing our lanyards and pins, Sis made sure to ask me if I didn't want to take that old, bowed Belle pin to trade it off for something better. No way, I said. She's staying!

Just a few days before we left on this trip, PinPics went through a massive site update, which prompted the start of the weekly PinPics Thursday ZOOM meetings. (In fact, we're pretty sure that a major impetus for this was how much feedback Sis was sending in via e-mail about bugs on the new site!) Next thing we knew, Sis got an e-mail invitation to give her feedback in person at the meeting. The announcement also said that not only would Molly be answering questions, but that Holland Hayes (aka Scoop Sanderson) would be speaking about pins for half an hour. Who??? We'd never heard of him, so we sent a few PMs to friends who’d been into pin trading in the parks for a long time to find out.

Being a bit shy, Sis wasn't exactly thrilled with the idea of a ZOOM chat. Besides, we had scheduled a Skype chat with our best friends for that same evening (20 Apr 2023), and I told her there was no way that I'd back out of that just to hear about the PinPics site and listen to some guy talk about old pins. Absolutely not! In the end, I set up the laptop and got on Skype, while Sis sat at the desktop and signed into the meeting with a pair of headphones (but no mic or webcam to allow her to do more than add notes into the chat). Her grand plan was to sit through the Q&A period with Molly and duck out on the guy talking about pins.

Things didn’t work out that way, though. Holland got the first half of the meeting, so Sis was "stuck". Not stuck for long, though. The correct word here would be "hooked". There was Holland, opening a refresher pack and talking about the original Cast Lanyard pins. Sis ended up repeating everything he said (to me and our friends, of course, since we were still on Skype), as we all stared at her computer screen. Before he stopped talking, she’d totally decided that she was going back the next week. Maybe he'd be on again, she said. 

A Night to Remember
The week passed pretty quickly, and another Thursday Night rolled around. This time we were in the middle of a really bad storm, and I had a headache and was lying down watching a quiet walkthrough of Animal Kingdom. Sis sat down at the desktop in the corner again, earphones on and tuned in, hoping Holland was going to come on. Sure enough, there he was! Did I want to come watch? No thanks. Not with the headache. Well, Holland came on with a bang (not literally), and Elizabeth made me come over and look right away. It's a moment that will be forever etched in my mind. There was Holland showing off one of his black-and-gold pin cards with a pair of real cloisonne and synthetic Belle head pins. He was explaining why the real cloisonne version of pin #1326 was such a great example of the early pins. He explained how the real cloisonne pins were made of ground glass (powdered silica), that there were only about one hundred color options, that the pins were heavy copper-based beauties, etc.

Honestly, the two of us stood with our noses glued to the computer screen (my headache was still there but suddenly seemed much less bothersome). Belle was definitely not going anywhere. Even Sis was smiling and actually said something to the effect that she was glad I'd kept the pin!

The next week rolled around, and there were the two of us, tuned in on the laptop with webcam and microphone running. As soon as the meeting was over, we stampeded downstairs to tell our Mom all the cool facts that we’d learned . . . and start a countdown until “next Thursday”.

For several months, Holland continued to come to the meetings to share cool facts and trivia about older pins. Once, he even showed the die used to make a real pin and packets of powdered silica that made those rich colors. Our enthusiasm grew each week, and we spent hours feeling our older pins to try and figure out if they were real cloisonne or not. Holland was even kind enough to look through pictures (tons of pictures) that I sent to him, always coming up with a friendly way to tell me that the pins were not real cloisonne, like Sis and I were hoping for. We e-mailed about all kinds of pins, and it was the beginning of a special friendship!

In the end, Sis and I only had two real cloisonne pins: Belle and an early Goofy head with a 2002 backstamp (PP32874). Don’t worry. Our enthusiasm was far from dampened! In fact, we were now on the hunt for some nice "old" pins! After hearing Holland’s cool trivia about PP3, we had to trade for that one, of course. We ended up with a synthetic version, rather than real cloisonne, but we weren’t very particular in the beginning. We just wanted OLD pins! We even ended up purchasing one of the WDW First Day/Last Day pins when it took "too long" to trade for it! We were officially jumping down the "old pin" rabbit hole, and our hobby had turned into a passion.

Narrowing the Field
As each Thursday meeting passed by, I’d mark more random “wants” on the list for anything old that seemed appealing. We traded for some of them and bought a few, but there weren’t enough parameters for me to narrow the field. In the back of my mind, the beauty of the real cloisonne pins just kept nagging at me. But how would I know that the pin I was getting was really real cloisonne? Which pins were actually produced in real cloisonne? Thankfully, Sis and I had a great opportunity to learn the answers to those questions in a very unexpected way.

Last fall, we went down to Florida for what we thought would be a couple of weeks of planning sessions for the military website we manage and a nice visit with our Grandmother. Hurricane Milton changed our plans, though, and we ended up spending the time at Holland’s house (very hurricane-proof). Seemed like a great opportunity to help him sort and organize his pins and office. What a life experience!

Three pin-crazy pals surrounded by drawers of pins. Practically from the moment we walked in, I told him that I wanted to be able to identify real cloisonne pins. He handed a pin to me and asked me to tell him if I thought it was real or synthetic. We did that numerous times every day while sorting, and you know what? It turns out that pins are like money. The more you handle them, the easier it is to identify the real ones. (Several decades ago, a bank manager told Mom that they didn’t have to train their tellers to identify counterfeit money. Just handling the real money made the fakes so obvious that the tellers were soon able to feel the difference.) It took about a week of doing this for me to gain any confidence in my ability to ID them (still a bit tricky for me to ID them by photo).

The pin that really “did it” for me was PP170, the original version of Mickey Drawing Walt Disney in the style of Norman Rockwell’s Self Portrait. It’s a rectangular flat pin, simple by description when compared to the 2001 pin-on-pin version of the same design. But that later pin (cute as it is) is synthetic, where the original version is a beautiful real cloisonne! It was one of the first pins that Holland tossed my way to ask if I could tell what kind it was, and for the rest of the trip I had that pin in my pocket, always handy to feel and compare to other pins. The weight of the copper base and enamel makes it a substantial-feeling pin that’s just so . . . satisfying. And cold (they really do feel cold when you pick them up).

The Importance of Sharing
For a while before all of this, I’d been a bit stalemated in my collections, because of a lack of new releases for my themes or scarcity of supply. While Sis enjoys a wide variety of collections (large and small), mine are more specific and limited. I need something to concentrate on when collecting, something with defined parameters. But a part of me was wishing that I could add to my “wants” list with as much fun and regularity as Sis does. The answer for me came in the real cloisonne pins, and it came because Holland was willing to take time to share his passion for pins.

Even though the “old and cold” pins are my passion right now, there are lots of other thrilling pins just waiting to be discovered again. In this hobby, it's easy to get caught up in the new merchandise, the monthly pin releases, and even the annual pin events. There are all kinds of attributes and designs to make each new pin bigger and better than the previous one, and we all like something different. But Disney pins are so much more than that! Sometimes the simple pins can be the most beautiful, and that older pin we pass by without a second glance could become a star in our collection, if we just gave it a little attention.

All of this is a roundabout way to come to the point of the story. There are a few Tiana pins that feature a slogan “Live Your Passion”, and that’s the best way we can share our passion. You never know who needs that little spark that only you can share, and sometimes it’s not even about learning new things. Sometimes it’s just about enjoying the hobby together! If Holland hadn’t taken his time to block out those Thursday evenings to show off pins and pin paraphernalia, Sis and I wouldn’t be where we’re at today. Those Belle pins probably didn’t seem very important in April 2023, but they were the thing that we needed to push us to a whole ‘nother level of pins. Never underestimate the little things.

And, Holland, thank you for sharing your pin passion!

If you’d like to learn more about pins and how they’re made, check out the recordings of Talkin’ Pins with The Twins on YouTube at Holland’s channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8hX7BvASAvnsQQyOMq4-RQ