I very much love pins...I, too, end up collecting more than trading, but I love to see what I find on CM lanyards, because most of the time I've never seen them before and if I like it, I don't care if it's Limited or whatever. I've actually gotten some of my best pins off CM lanyards just because I liked them...on our honeymoon, I traded a CM for a pin that had Mickey on a blue balloon, because it reminded me of my childhood trips to the park, when I always HAD to have a Mickey head balloon. Much to my surprise, it turned out to be a CM-only pin!
I've found a great way to display mine -- we found some cloth-covered cork boards on sale at OfficeMax (regular $60, we paid $15 each), and I display all my pins on those. We have them up in our office/junk room. They're great, since I get to look at my pins all the time and they always bring back good memories.
The drawback...those little pins can get soooo EXPENSIVE! And I had a bad CM-trading experience a couple of years ago that almost put me off trading forever. (It was E-ride night, and he made me wait 45 minutes to trade with him, and then accused me of being a 'pin shark' because I wanted to trade him for two of the special Lanyard Pins -- which I didn't even know WERE Lanyard Pins -- he had on his gold lanyard! It was an awful experience, because he made me feel about 2-inches tall, as if I had no right to be pin trading!) But then last October on our second
Disney cruise, I decided to try again, and found the love of the treasure hunt and CM interaction again. I decided I wasn't going to let one bad experience put me off...and now I know better than to let someone like him bully me - I should have reported him to Guest Services for making me feel so bad.
We're going to WDW this October, and I'm already going through my pins to decide which ones I'd be willing to trade for new finds!
