I started collecting pins when I was about twelve. I bought my first one on an afternoon visit to Windsor, Ontario during a family trip to Detroit where my aunt, uncle, and cousins lived. Since then I’ve collected quite a number of pins from all over the world which, in most of the places I’ve lived, have been proudly displayed on a cork board. Colorful and memorable – I love my pin collection. So on my first trip to Disneyland in 2001 I was excited to discover that Disney pin trading is very popular. There are lots of places all over the parks and in Downtown Disney to buy pins, plus cast members wear lanyards filled with pins that you can trade with them for. (I’ve never actually traded for a pin, but I think it’s a great idea.) I was skeptical about wearing any of my pins on a lanyard for fear of looking dorkier than usual, but a few years ago I broke down and I bought one and it didn’t take long for me to fill it with pins. I got them at the parks as well as online where all the best limited edition ones can be found. The lanyard looked great hanging from a hook on my corkboard, next to the rest of my pins. Then Dan and I moved in to our house. I got rid of my corkboard because it was in bad shape and the lanyard got packed away in a box for the move. As we were settling in to the house, quite a lot of our stuff ended up in one of the upstairs bedroom that we affectionately call the “game room.” “Junk room” is more like it, but that’s beside the point. Stuff like textbooks and action figures were relegated to the game room because they didn’t quite fit anywhere else, so so when I went looking for my pin lanyard I figured that was the most likely place to find it. But despite several searches, until yesterday I hadn’t seen it since we moved in almost five years ago. Every time we went to Disneyland I lamented about my missing lanyard (I know Dan was tired of hearing about it) so I finally bought a new one and a few new pins over my birthday weekend. But then last night after I thought I had looked everywhere and resigned myself to the fact that my old lanyard was lost forever, I finally found it. Apparently I packed in a little box that I don’t remember owning, put it on the bottom of a bigger box, and then covered it up with lots and lots of Legos. Brilliant! The good news is that I didn’t accidentally throw it out. In the above photo my first pin lanyard is the black one on the left, next to a couple of jumbo limited edition pins that didn’t fit on it and a Simba pin that was part of a set that my friend Jamie gave me for my 16th birthday. My favorite one is Lilo and Stitch as Belle and the Beast. So adorable. My new lanyard is the red one on the right. I love the Darth Tater pin. (The combination of Star Wars and Disney might seem strange at first, but it really works as far as I’m concerned, which is why I’m so excited for the new incarnation of the Star Tours at Disneyland later this year). Now that all of my pins are together at last I need to figure out a way to display them. Any idea where I can get a stylish corkboard for our game room?