Enamel pin wall hanging

I had a decent amount of enamel pins rattling around in a wooden box that weren’t really seeing the light of day. I want to be able to look at the cute pins I’ve collected instead of hoarding them, so I decided to make a wall hanging!

The wall hanging is done up in solid quilting cottons from Joann’s, quilted with some batting. I added another layer of backing fabric in the salmon pink, in order to self-bind the wall hanging. With 4 layers including batting, the banner is fairly thick. It took some work to get the pins through, and I thought for a second there this might get repurposed as a table mat.

I considered adding corners on the back or straps on the top in order to hang the banner from a dowel, but remembered I had some cute colorful binder clips. So, this is now hanging from two contrasting yellow clips.

The wall hanging is the first thing on my office wall; I’m hoping to make some vibrant mini quilts to collage on the wall.

Learnings

I’ve never self-bound a quilted item before, and basically just YOLO’d it. I wish I had cut my backing fabric just a bit wider, maybe 1/4” or 1/2” in each direction. That would’ve helped account for the height of the “sandwich”. Where the binding looks especially wiggly or the corners silly (i.e. folded over instead of mitered) is where I really didn’t have enough room to do it right. I am, of course, too lazy to seam rip the darn thing and cut a new piece.

From these instructions on self-binding a quilt, I’ll also try folding down the corners first (instead of folding them down after the first lateral fold), and hit the corner with a gluestick.

Enamel Pin Sources

I unfortunately don’t remember all of my sources; some are from Short Run Comics Fest, ECCC, or purchased elsewhere online. You can get some of these pins from:

• Andrea Bell
• Corgi Things
• Hannako Lambert
• Japanese Breakfast merch store
• Love to Sew
• Mis0 Happy
• Netlify store (well, in my new employee pack!)
• Pretty Useful
• The Yetee

Clearly, I have room for more pins…