What's your favorite pin?

When I buy pins at WDW, I tend to buy either duplicates of what I buy, or buy stuff that I know other people want or make good trading. And since I get to meet many pin traders, both at WDW and also here in the Chicagoland area, I can use them for trading. So over the years, I get to collect a lot of pins.

Buying over ebay, or from any non-Disney source, is always a risk. Although, I must say that you don't get taken in when you're buying individual pins. Sellers that sell individual pins, especially when they tend to be more of the expensive ones, don't want their reputation ruined very quickly if they are caught selling scrappers. Many of my friends buy pins on ebay, and they either tend to know the reputable ones, or they know when they should stay away. Now, the ones that sell big lots of pins, those I would certainly be weary about, since those can easily contain scrappers.

Zz.

Zz - I'm thinking about buying a "lot" of them, I realize that I'm going to get some scrappers, but I'm only going to buy from a seller who has no bad rep on eBay. I'm going to try one time and see what I get. What's the best way to find if it's a scrapper or not when I get the pins? Just the prints on the back?

And also..I'm not sure how to find a trading group like you? I live in Wichita, so not a huge city. How did you find yours?

And one more thing..what do you recommend for someone like me? I want to start a pin collection, and I have very few right now (about 20), but I only go to WDW once every year or two, so I don't get a chance to trade with all the CMs there all that often. What do you recommend? 20 isn't many to trade online either...so what do you think? What would you do?

If you ever find yourself in the Disney Store in Downtown Chicago (either the one on State Street or on Michigan Ave), don't miss out on these pins if they still have them in stock. You can find these pins only at these two stores.

The one of the right also has a t-shirt and a reusable bag of the same design.

They have other Chicago-specific Disney merchandise at these two stores. They are not available at the other suburban Disney stores in the Chicagoland area.

Zz.

Love that pin with mickey hanging on the light post

Ok so I got my pins I ordered in the mail today. I didn't by any means have an expecation for them to be real at $14 for 25 pins, but I gave it a shot and I still have some 11 days to return them. Anyways. Sure enough the pins were no doubt scrappers. Rough edges, flat paint (rather than glossy), borders around the back on backs with Mickeys, odd feeling pin backs. No doubt they were fake. I just wanted to give it a try. If you really wanted to, it'd be quite easy to trade them with cast members at a Disney resort, but I wouldn't do something like that. I feel guilty when I rip people off. We're returning the pins tomorrow. I feel like it's worth the few bucks to know whether those pins are real or not. So just a heads up, don't buy on eBay, unless you plan on ripping some CMs off.

Ok here is the pin I said was my favorite.

For those of you that did not see the post. J is a sailor, he was on an aircraft carrier at the time and he will be going back to one soon, and we love stitch.

It was a bloodless massacre!

We had 3 full frames of Mickey Pins. However, because our other collections have significantly increased in size, and I'm determine to keep all our pins only on the walls that they are on now, something has to go. We decided to take down all of our Mickey pin frames, and trade them away.... except for a few that we really, really like. So out of about 200 Mickey pins, we are now down to only these few that we are keeping.

We're doing all this to update our photo database of our pin collection before we leave for the upcoming Pin Event.

Zz.

These are two pins that we are keeping, not as part of the Mickey pins, but rather part of the set frame. These were "surprise" pins, meaning at that time, they were never announced in advanced. If you happened to be looking at the pin racks, or if you browsed through the Disney pins website on the day it was released, only then would you have noticed these pins.

I like them because of the simplicity of the design, the complete pair has Mickey and Minnie, and you can actually use them as ornaments on your tree!

We have an extra complete pair of these pins, and the ones you see in this picture is going into the trading pin book that we will take with us this week to the pin event.

Zz.

Been doing a lot of pin sorting in anticipation of our trip later this week. I came across this set that is one of my most favorite set. I forgot what it took to get these pins (I'm sure a lot of trading of LE pins). But it was worth it.

Now, if only Disney will produce a large print of this pin......

Zz.

I really like all my 'special event' pins. My favorite so far is the pin I bought on September 9, 2009. Chip and Dale surrounded by acorns and it says 999.

We had 3 full frames of Mickey Pins. However, because our other collections have significantly increased in size, and I'm determine to keep all our pins only on the walls that they are on now, something has to go. We decided to take down all of our Mickey pin frames, and trade them away.... except for a few that we really, really like. So out of about 200 Mickey pins, we are now down to only these few that we are keeping.

We're doing all this to update our photo database of our pin collection before we leave for the upcoming Pin Event.

Zz.