Enamel pins are the best outfit accessory. They’re a tiny little spot of colour and joy that can be added to pretty much any outfit to bring a little more happiness to my sartorial world. I will wear a little pin most days to work and often base my geeky outfits around them.
Over the years I have amassed quite a collection of enamel pins to the point where they have become somewhat of a problem! I have pins stacked in little boxes on my bedside table and scattered on coffee tables and other flat surfaces all over my home. I’ll regularly dump out the contents of several pin boxes onto my bed looking for a particular pin who’s location I have forgotten. It’s not ideal! Plus I’d like to be able to look at my gorgeous pin collection as the art pieces so many of them are.
The problem it most pin storage solutions don’t work for me. I don’t like pin boards as they don’t let me store brooches with bar backs and I will definitely lose the pin backs once they are removed from the pins, and I don’t like big pin flags as it makes it tricky to pull off individual pins.
So I’ve devised a solution that should give me the best of both worlds; tiny pin flags attached to a mesh on the wall. That way I can both see and access my pins. Also, it will give me an excuse to buy some gorgeous quilting fabric that I might not get a chance to buy otherwise as well as something to use my fabric scraps on.
Step one was to dig into my fabric stash and find some lovely fabric that I could admit I was unlikely to turn into clothing. I got this Tardis print fabric years ago on sale and I love it, but the only think I can think to make with is a skirt, and I already have too many skirts I rarely wear.
This fabric was chopped into rectangles a little over double the size I wanted the tags to end up. I didn’t measure them, just kindof eyeballed it. I am looking for a little variety in the size and shape of my tags, so this method worked well. For uniformity I would have to had measured.
Step two was folding all the fabric in half and making a little crease with my nail. I didn’t want to iron this in as it’ll eventually be inverted. This is just a preparatory step, but I found removing this part of the next step made it significantly easier.
I did all this folding together in a batch as there are so many tags! It did become a tiny bit of a production line.
Step three was to mark the tags in the shape I wanted and pin along the lines. I wanted the tops to be clipped like an old-style paper tag so I marked out that shape. It means that I’ll lose a little space for pins, but I suspect the top corners would have flopped down under the weight of the pins anyways as I’m not putting in any wire or stiffening fabric.
Hot tip; this should have been marked on the opposite side of the fold and pinned with the sharp points of the pins facing the opposite direction. This will become important when we reach the sewing machine.
Step four was to sew along the marked lines to form the edges of the tag. Nice simple straight lines with the feet being raised with the needle down to swivel at the corners. I put on some podcasts and sewed up a big batch of these at once.
However, all of the lovely pins I placed to hold the tags together were facing the wrong direction, so the stabby end was pointed towards my fingers. Apart from the obvious painful implications of this, it also meant that the pins had to be removed earlier than I would have liked to prevent my sewing machine eating the head of the pin and exploding.
Let’s just say the placement of the pins meant that the sewing gods definitely ended up getting their blood sacrifice for this project!
Step five was to cut off the excess fabric around the corners and seams of the tags to make them less bulky when folding them out. This made a huge mess on the floor! Which I of course cleaned up straight away…
Step six was turning the tags out so that the nice fabric was on the outside. I used a closed quick-unpick to force the corners out so they were a little sharper and used my fingers to smooth the edges down and start creating that nice creased edge.
Step seven involved more pins! To close the tags off and hide away all those raw edges I turned the open base of the tags in on themselves. A pin was placed at either side to told it in place for the next few steps.
Step eight was ironing. This fabric is cotton quilting fabric, so I was able to use high heat and lots of steam to get nice crisp folds around the edges. I also use glass headed pins in my sewing as they won’t melt into a puddle of plastic when I moosh them with an iron.
I love the impact ironing has on sewing projects. It is usually at the ironing stage where I start to see a project coming together, and it was no different for these tags… despite the fact that there is still a bit of work left to put in.
Step nine was finishing off that bottom edge. I ran a line of stitching as close to the fold as I could to trap the raw edges on the inside of the tag. The ironing helped keep the fold in place when I removed one of the pins to fit it under the sewing machine, and this time I actually thought about which way the stabby edges of the pins were pointed to I could smoothly pull them out as the machine laid down it’s line of stitching.
Step ten was the final step of sewing, and it was time to break out the hand sewing tools! I used a needle and thread to stitch tiny bulldog clips onto the top of the tags. I first used three loopy stitches to tack the bottom part of the clip in place and then just followed around the edge of it. I didn’t really have a plan with this, short of “sew this to that”, but I think it worked out well!
Previously I’ve used eyelets and ribbon to hold the clip in place, but I find this takes just as much time as hand sewing and doesn’t sit as nicely on my wall. Plus there’s a certain kind of calmness in hand sewing that I quite enjoy.
Step eleven was adding pins to their new homes! I don’t really organise pins in any specific order, so putting pins on tags is more like a fun game of Tetris than anything else. My favourite things in pins is any matched sets or facing pins, these I keep together, but anything else is fair game.
Step twelve was clipping the tags to the mesh attachments on my wall. Got the mesh from a hardware store, it’s supposed to be put in the garden to grow vines up. I think this is a much better use of it!
The tags can be layered up or spaced out depending on the size of your pin collecting habit. My tags ended up overlapping a bit, but not enough to cover up any of the pins. So I have lots of room to grow my collection!
And that’s it! Time consuming, but a great excuse to use chunks of quilting cotton that I wouldn’t normally have a good excuse to use. And at the end I can admire all my pretty pins on pretty fabric on my wall and smile.