Opinions needed

You would need a lot of them, but I bought a spoon display shadow box/frame with a nice big door at Michael's Art store. I very easily removed the spoon racks which left a wall of nice black velvet to mount the pins on! I think it'll hold roughly 30 to 40 pins depending on size. I really like it! Otherwise Margaret, you may want to contact the A&E tv show, Pin Hoarders to help you out! :lol:

Oh pulease - if Margaret goes on Hoarders she can hide behind me! Shucks, she can probably point at me for nursing her hobby back when she was just getting her "sea" legs.

Margaret - I don't do bags unless I'm bringing a trader bag to Florida; but we're a 'split tribe' in this house. I have several (several!) shadow boxes of my favorites and my older DA LE's. The rest are on varying sizes of cork/peg boards - I put "L" joints on the backs to keep the boards from falling apart and they're hung/leaning all over the place. The size I have hold about 400-500 each.

Coach thinks all pins should be in books, but he has less than 1,000 - I think once you are "playing with the big dogs" you have to find a better way; plus, I want to SEE them. I have various boards - even one that sits up by my closet of the pins I tend to wear the most.

The kids both have boards in their rooms (it was cute when my daughter was finally taller than her board ) PLUS pin bags...so we're a split tribe, but since I'm the one answering, I strongly recommend boards - I've only damaged one b/c it was on a spring and I had three boards leaned together. Lesson learned.

One more thing (a la Columbo, if you remember him)...

The one end-all solution, and I'm shocked nobody's really tried this before, is a map file system. A retired teacher friend does photography and trinkets from around the world. He stores all of his smaller items in his map file, which is like a file cabinet, but the drawers are roughly 1 1/2" in height, 36-42" in width, and about 24-36" in depth. It makes total sense when you line the shelf with foam-core board and just slap the pins in the drawer. With 4-6 shelves, there's more than enough space to house a vast amount of your beloved pins, including the thick pin-on-pin and diorama pins. The cost of a new map file cabinet may be astronomical, but considering that it would be free of dust, in a sturdy cabinet, easy to view, and lockable (some models), it may be just the investment pin collectors may need. Here in L.A., we have office liquidators such as A.B.E. to acquire those cabinets at a lower cost. Looks like this:
If your collection sounds as vast as swim2sea's, you may need this!
Just food for thought.