ECollecting lapel pins for approximately twenty years, Fred has quite a collection. He has over 20,000 different lapel pins and some 120,000 extras. Each lapel pin has a different story.

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Are you wearing a American Flag lapel pin?

Yes? Then you love America.

No? Hmm. That’s gonna be a problem.

Such was the false dichotomy that faced Barack Obama during his April 16 debate against Hillary Clinton, when Charlie Gibson asked Obama a voter question about why he did not wear a flag pin on his lapel. The previous October, an Iowa ABC reporter had asked him a similar question, to which Obama replied that he had worn one after 9/11, but soon noticed, “people wearing a lapel pin but not acting very patriotic.” He went on to explain, “I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest. Instead I’m going to try to tell the American people what I believe… and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.” Naturally, a controversy erupted. When it came up again during the April debate, he made a similar point.

Obama now wears a flag pin on his lapel. Every day.

Short of wearing a stars and stripes onesie, the flag lapel pin is the quickest sartorial method for a politician to telegraph his or her patriotism. The origin of the flag lapel pin is murky, though it is by necessity linked the history of the American flag as a commonly used symbol. According to Marc Leepson’s Flag: An American Biography, the “near religious reverence many Americans have” for our national symbol dates only to the Civil War era (not back to the Revolutionary War, as many assume) . Prior to that, few private citizens possessed or flew their own flags — it was limited to military and federal facilities. When the Confederates started winning battles early on in the War Between the States, Northerners began to fly the flag as a sign of pride.

Since then, flag imagery has been intricately tied to moments of crisis or conflict. Over the past four decades, Kit Hinrichs, one of the nation’s top graphic designers, has collected more than 5,000 pieces of stars and stripes–related memorabilia. He says the flag lapel pins in his collection don’t really date back before mid-century. “I don’t think it was a common thing for men and women to wear before the Second World War,” he says. “I certainly have jewelry from before then with flags on it — cufflinks and stick pins and tuxedo buttons and brooches — but not [many flag pins] before the ’50s.”

It was during the culture wars of the late ’60s and early ’70s that the flag lapel pin truly took off and became the simultaneously uniting and divisive symbol that it is today. Republican candidates in the 1970 congressional race wore them as a symbol of patriotic solidarity against anti-Vietnam protesters like Abbie Hoffman — who donned a shirt made of the flag — or others who stitched the flag onto the seat of their pants. But it was Richard Nixon who brought the pin to national attention. According to Stephen E. Ambrose’s biography Nixon, the President got the idea for sporting a lapel pin from his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, who had noticed a similar gesture in the Robert Redford film The Candidate. Nixon commanded all of his aides to go and do likewise. The flag pins were noticed by the public, and many in Nixon’s supposed “silent majority” began to similarly sport flags on their lapels. Over the next few decades, the pin sporadically surged in popularity. During the Gulf War, they sold briskly alongside flag patches and yellow ribbons.

Then came 9/11. Taking a page from the Nixon Administration, George W. Bush and his aides all donned pins. So did many anchors on Fox News, though not Bill O’Reilly, who said at the time “I’m just a regular guy. Watch me and you’ll know what I think without wearing a pin.” ABC News, on the other hand, prohibited its on-air reporters from pinning on the red, white, and blue, citing a desire to maintain journalistic credibility.

As befits a tradition that reached its height during the Nixon years, flag lapel pins have — fairly or not — become to many a shibboleth of America’s War on Terror, and a symbol of the “either you’re with us or against us” ethos that has often prevailed since September 11, 2001. And while the country hasn’t yet reached anything close to a consensus on what a flag pin says about its wearer, Barack Obama seems to have discovered that symbols matter — even if one doesn’t agree with the way they are used.Highwaymen movies

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Keep your money. 

Keep your food, your hats, your programs and your autographs.

It doesn’t matter who you are. They just want your pins.

Who, you ask?

Everyone.

Little League Baseball World Series pins are worth their weight in gold here at the PA P.E. That’s right, it’s the (unofficial) Pennsylvania Pin Exchange right here in South Williamsport. And it’s not just for the kids.

“My brother and I, we were into Little League coaching and Little League board and we just started in the pins craze because everybody was doing it,” said Clark County, Virginia’s Terry Carroll, who has been trading pins at the Series for the past eight years with his wife and son. “Been doing it ever since.”

The pin trading system here at the Little League World Series is rooted in an Olympic tradition started in Athens, Greece in 1896.

These “pins” actually got their start as badges used to identify and separate officials and athletes. But in 1906, the first true pin – in the colors of the Swedes – made its debut. 

It wasn’t until 1924 that athletes began exchanging pins as a sign of international camaraderie, and through the 1970s, trading of these small signs of friendship was restricted to athletes and officials. 

The 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York marked the beginning of pin trading en masse. It allowed spectators and collectors alike to participate in the international togetherness for which the Olympic Games stood.

Now, Little League fans around the world just can’t get enough.

“I never had a pin until four years ago when I came here and saw the pin trading,” said Matt Flint, a New York native who has traveled to Williamsport for the past five Series. “I thought it would be neat and got into it. Now I have probably 5,000 pins.”

Kids, players and spectators can always be found in the pin tent, which serves as the main arena to facilitate trading. The large white tent is located between Howard J. Lamade and Volunteer Stadium, and it is hopping with traders, who are busy admiring collections and making deals. Three Days of the Condor divx

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“Yeah, [we go] all the time,” said Davenport, Iowa player Chase Pfab. “Before the trading tent started we used to trade a lot in [the International Grove]. Now the trading tent started, so we trade a lot down there.”

Pfab said he started didn’t start trading until his regional tournament August 4 - 13 in Indianapolis.

“Everybody wants the [Snickers] cleat pins,” said Pfab. “And they’ll trade, like, 10 pins for them.”

Each year, Snickers designs a new pin, and produces a set specific to each team. This year, it’s the cleats. Then, the kids are given all the pins to trade among themselves and try to assemble a complete set.

Pfab, whose favorite pins are his quartet of tigers from a Little League team in Wisconsin, has all 16.

But there are pin collectors who come to the Little League World Series in search of certain pins, and sometimes things get ugly.

“Sometimes it is [cutthroat],” said Carroll. “But overall, they’re good pin traders. Everybody tries to get along.

“Once in awhile you’ll have a bad egg in the bunch, as they say, but he kinda senses that nobody wants to trade with him and he’ll either straighten up or he’ll go on,” he added.

Luckily, Carroll said there are no bad eggs yet this year.

In fact, many of the adults who come to Williamsport support the young traders.

“I didn’t realize how involved [trading] was,” said Heather Shnyder, mother of rookie pin trader Corey Kriner. “I didn’t realize the people that are into this – the kids all the way up to the retired folks. 

“It’s amazing how all the people say ‘Oh, is this his first time? Well here, we’ll give him a couple extra pins so he can get started,’” she continued. “And they’re trying to coach him along as to which ones are a little bit more valuable than the others, and which ones might be more in demand than others.”

But adults aren’t the only experts on the going rate in Williamsport.

Eight-year-old Tanner Leblanc has been in the business of pin trading for half his life, and it’s his friend Corey Kriner’s first day.

“[Tanner]’s been teaching me how to do it,” said Kriner. “And probably by the end of the day I’ll have 50 or more.”

How many does the nine-year-old have now?

“Too many to count,” he said. “I have a lot of favorites, but there’s two I’m not trading.”

Those two are a small gold Devil Rays pin and an American flag pin with the words “Rockland County” across the bottom, so traders beware. Those are Kriner Keepers. 

“I don’t really know why [they are my favorites], but they are really special to me, in a way,” said Kriner.

Leblanc’s favorite pin was hiding in his pocket. “Canfield Baseball, Ohio,” it says. 

Neither boy is from the district his favorite pin represents. Both are from neighboring Montgomery, PA.

But it’s Leblanc, a four-year veteran of the Pennsylvania Pin Exchange, who is the pin trading master (see sidebar).

“Most of the people – if it’s your first time – you go up to one of those guys over there and they’ll give you some free ones,” said Kriner. “It’s really fun, once you get the hang of it.”

It’s “those guys over there” who are the bloodline of the pin trading system. Almost all of them want to help.

“Every situation is different,” said Carroll. “Some kids just starting out, they may not have very good pins. But you trade with them anyway because you gotta remember you were there one time yourself.

“When you got started, people treated you good, so you gotta treat other people good,” he explained. “And that’s where you gotta explain to kids, say, ‘Hey, be nice and people will trade with you. If you’re mean and nasty, nobody’ll trade with you.’”

Carroll isn’t the only one who’s in it for the kids.

Rick Lumbard is a hometown trader who has come to the Little League World Series for nine years to trade pins.

“My kids got me into it,” Lumbard said. “We live right up the road, so we’re here every year.”

Lumbard sits just outside the pin tent with a little wooden table and a folding chair to escape the hustle and bustle of the other traders. A purple cloth bag hangs under the table, waiting to keep his bartered daily prizes safe and out of reach.

“I don’t have anything as major as some of these people do,” he said. “But I’m always here and the kids are always trading.”

It doesn’t matter to Lumbard what kind of pins he trades for, either. 

“It’s just a piece of metal,” he explained. “There’s some pins you try to collect – the Little League pins over the years, the Snickers pins – everybody’s trying to get the snickers pins. Not me.”

Then there’s Jay Freeman. 

Freeman owns the Natural Energy Utility Corporation, a residential utility company, and drives to Williamsport from Kentucky to volunteer his time each year (and this is his 12th) as a Section 1 usher at Lamade Stadium.

Freeman has been making Little League mascot Dugout pins for 10 years now. He has a pin for each of her 13 different costumes. 

Between games Monday, he was caught making a trade with another pin fanatic.

“He does Smurfs,” Freeman said of his trading partner. “Then he made a set of frogs, and so I just traded him my 13 pins for his eight pins.”

Freeman designs his pins every year and sends them off to be produced.

“This year, I spent a little over $10,000 on pins,” Freeman said. “I don’t sell ‘em, just trade ‘em. I give them away. Everything in my pocket I give to kids.”

Why would anyone spend so much money, just to give it all away?

“It’s just fun,” he said. “Something else to do here at Little League.”

Though its Freeman’s son who got the pin collection started, the businessman has taken over the hobby in a big way.

“I turned my conference room into corkboard walls, there’s no plaster in the room,” Freeman explains. “When I go back, I give [my secretary] all the pins and she puts them all up on the corkboard so when I have meetings in my conference room, people always say, ‘what’s that?’ And I explain to them that it’s Little League Baseball.”

Freeman created 20 new pins this year and has a collection of more than 10,000. He’ll probably return to his hometown of Ashland, KY with three or four thousand more for his secretary.

So if anyone sees Jay Freeman’s secretary, tell her to start warming up that pushing finger.

“It just really something fun to do, if you wanna know the truth,” Freeman said. “Unfortunately, you have some adults here that make pins that their heart’s not right. They take advantage of the kids, they do.”

Sometimes, the young ballplayers don’t realize the value of their pins. Other times, players are very clear on how precious their “stock” is.

“The hardest team to trade with was three years ago, our Moscow team,” said Freeman. “They knew their Moscow pins had value, so they were very hard to trade with. They would trade one of their pins for three, four or five of your pins. They were very smart – they knew their pins were rare.”

So what are the bylines of the Exchange?

“The rule of thumb I’ve learned in coming up here for eight years is you trade one pin for one pin,” said Carroll. “[But] once in a while, you have your little deals that people make on the side, just like anything else.”

And what do people look for in a pin?

“I just like anything that appeals to me,” said Flint. “It could be Little League affiliated, it could be a cartoon character, whatever. A lot of people here, it’s just Little League pins. They don’t want anything else.”

Some are looking to complete unfinished sets. 

“I’m looking for pins to continue the sets that I have,” said Gil Ladouceur, an umpire who annually drives to the Series from Canada. Ladouceur got his first pin in 1978, and he has only missed one year since.

Ladouceur has more than 25,000 pins, which take up all four walls of a room in his LaSalle, Ontario home.

“I’ve got no place to put ‘em,” he said. “My wife says no more walls.”

But pin trading is hugely popular among the Little Leaguers, too, and none of the players lets the language barriers of the international tournament get in the way.

“We use finger signals and all different stuff,” said Iowa’s Ryan Shumaker. 

For instance, a two-for-one trade would be indicated by raising two fingers, followed by a fist and then a raised index finger.

“Latin America,” Pfab added, “they say ‘change’ for ‘trade’ and stuff like that. They point at books and say ‘change change.’”

Mexico’s Alejandro Valenzuela trades pins through his bi-lingual teammate, Kevin Garcia. 

“I trade them to see what teams were here and what players I could get them from,” said Valenzuela.

He is one of only three Mexico players who trades with other teams, and he has a pin for them all.

“He takes a person who knows how to speak English [to get them],” Garcia said. “Like I’m doing now.”

Freeman, on the other hand, will just give pins away to the kids he can’t communicate with.

“If they give me one [back], fine. If they don’t, fine,” he said.

The P.A.P.E. is nothing to scoff at. The players are all mini-Greenspans and the traders are the buyers and sellers that make the system tick. 

And this Little League tradition not only travels far and wide, but transcends through the ages.

Boston Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek has kept the pins he collected during his stay at the 1984 Little League World Series through the fame and fortune of winning the Major League Baseball World Series. In a conference call Friday night with the New England Little League champs from Westbrook, Maine, the major league catcher asked if the boys from Maine were still trading.

Of course they are, Jason. Everybody’s doing it.

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At PinCrafters, we feel it is important to give our customers the product they expect.  There are many differences between the different custom lapel pin processes.  We do not call any of our pins Epola, instead, we call it Hard Enamel.

Epola custom pins are made from pouring powdered synthetic enamel into the recesses of a die-struck (stamped) brass base. The colors are matched using actual Pantone Colors. After being baked at a very high temperature, the synthetic enamel is sanded and polished to flush out the metal lines that separate the colors on the pins. This gives the custom pins a smooth and lustrous quality.

 

BE CAREFUL:

 Epola is not actual Hard Enamel lapel pins.  These custom lapel pins are imitation hard enamel.  These are very high quality pins but do not have the same durability as actual cloisonne pins.

Please call us with any questions.

 

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Cloisonné

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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  (Redirected from Cloisonne)

Cloisonné, an ancient metalworking technique, is a multi-step enamel process used to produce jewelry, vases, and other decorative items and custom lapel pins. (The resulting objects can also be called cloisonné.)

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Adding cloisons according to the pattern previously transferred to the workpiece

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Adding frit with dropper after sintering cloisons. Upon completion the piece will be fired Havoc film , then ground (repeating as necessary) then polished and electroplated. This is the same process we use to make authentic cloisonne custom lapel pins.

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Cloisonné first developed in the Near East

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Cloisonné process

1. Body-making. the artist forms metal
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    (such as copper, bronze Dracula 3000 movie download , or silver) into the shape of the finished object. The material usually used for making the body is copper, for it is easily hammered and stretched.  For custom lapel pins, we also use a brass base metal.

2. Filigree-soldering. which is pure silver wire usually about .010 x .040 inches in cross section, is bent into shapes that define the colored areas. The bends are all done at right angles, so that wire does not curve up. This is done with small pliers, tweezers, and custom made jigs. The cloisonné wire pattern may consist of several intricately constructed wire patterns that fit together into a larger design. Solder can be used to join the wires, but it causes the enamel to discolor and form bubbles later on. Instead the base metal is fired with a thin layer of clear enamel. The cloisonné wire is glued to the enamel surface with gum Tragacanth. When the gum Tragacanth has dried the piece is fired again to fuse the cloisonné wire to the clear enamel. The gum Tragacanth burns off leaving no residue.
3. Enamel-filling. The basic elements of enamel are boric acid, saltpetre and alkaline. Due to the difference in the minerals added, the colour differs accordingly. Usually one with much iron will turn grey, with uranium, yellow, with chromium, green, with zinc, white, with bronze, blue, with gold or iodine, red. In time of filling, all the colours, ground beforehand into minute powder and contained in plates, are placed in front of the workers and are then applied to the little compartments separated by filigree.  Lapel Pins often have much smaller areas to fill than bowls or other items than pins.
4. Enamel-firing. This is done by putting the article, with its enamel fillings, to the crucible. The enamel in the little compartment will sink down a bit after firing. That will require a refilling. This process will go on repeatedly until the little compartments are finally filled.
5. Polishing. Some pieces of hard carbon are used for polishing so as to obtain some lustre on the surface of the article.
6. Gilding. The article is placed in fluid of gold or silver. The exposed parts of the filigree and the metal fringes of the article will be smoothly and evenly gilded. The exposed metal is electroplated with a thin film of gold to prevent corrosion and to give a pleasing appearance. On lapel pins the gold areas are a great way to highlight the various colors of the custom lapel pins.

Beads and Custom Pins

Cloisonné beads also occur commonly; and one use of Chinese cloisonné beads

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• Quantity - The more you order, the less baseball trading pins cost. Why is that? Because, with larger orders, there is more room to distribute manufacturing and setup expenses. That’s why the more baseball trading pins you buy, the cheaper each baseball trading pin will cost.
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When you are looking to have nothing but the finest quality custom lapel pins, choose precious metal. These custom lapel pins are produced by our finest jewelers with over 15 years of experience. Our jewelry quality items feature 14K Gold, 10K Gold and Sterling Silver options. Genuine diamonds, rubies, emeralds and sapphires are available.  These precious metal custom lapel pins are a great way to show any number of accomplishments.  University Classes, Years of Service, Anniversaries and much much more.  These are truly a piece of jewelry one will hold onto for years to come.

Steve Grimm

PinCrafters National Sales Manager/Owner  steveg@pincrafters.com  888.388.4288

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	Have a pin to duplicate? Please send it in a padded envelope or call 1.888.388.4288 or email with size and description. We guarantee the highest quality at the lowest price.

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Art Requirements

Camera-ready art is preferred in AI (Adobe Illustrator) or EPS format. TIFF, JPEG or BMP gladly accepted. Do not have artwork? No problem. Let our in-house art department help turn your logo or idea into a great pin design at no additional charge.

Attachments

Pricing includes a standard military clutch or safety pin back. We offer additional attachments to enhance your emblem. Please click here

for more info or call1.888.388.4288 for pricing.

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Normal production takes 3-4 weeks. Rush service is available in as little as 5 days…yes 5 days! Working with a deadline? Let us know and we will do our best to meet any request.

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All pins are poly-bagged. We offer a number of packaging options to enhance the presentation of your pin. From imprinted cards to gift boxes…you name it, we’ve got it. Click here Kiss Of The Vampire aka Immortally Yours dvd for more info or call 1.888.388.4288 for pricing.

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Pricing includes up to four colors. Designs that require extra colors may incur additional charges. PinCrafters uses the Pantone Matching System (PMS) when possible.

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