Mud, felt, ribbon: The most coveted Fur Rondy pins were made by hand in Anchorage living rooms

After moving to Alaska in 1962, every winter for Sylvia Butcher revolved around making pins for Fur Rendezvous.

For four years, from 1963 to 1966, Butcher helped her mother-in-law, Hazel Butcher, fashion hundreds of pins out of clay they collected from the beach cliff of Point Woronzof. They smeared the blue-tinged clay, then popular among local potters, into molds Hazel Butcher designed herself. After letting them set, they fired the pins in kilns at Hazel's home, turning them a rusty red color. Then the Butchers, along with a handful of other family members, worked the pins in an assembly line — glazing them, firing them in the kiln again and attaching pieces of fabric or ribbon.

They individually dotted each musher's fur ruff with a paintbrush to make the fur look more real. They carefully glued clay heads onto felt kuspuks. They carved out the words "Anchorage Fur Rendezvous 1965" onto a polar bear sitting on an iceberg. Butcher painted hundreds of husky tongues bright red for the 1964 pins.

It wasn't easy work.

"When I look at that, all I think is 'broken heads,' " Butcher said in her Spenard home Tuesday. She was talking about the 1966 pin, a musher on a sled with a gold ribbon trailing behind. The narrow necks could be flimsy before being fired in the kiln, she said, and many broke.

Butcher's pins were made in the handful of years before the festival switched to the mass-produced metal ones sold today. That makes them especially valuable among avid Fur Rondy pin collectors.

Butcher said they first sold the pins for $1 each. The handmade ones now sell for hundreds of dollars apiece.

Pin collecting is one of the subcultures of the annual festival. Each year a pin with a different design is released, and thousands are sold each year, according to festival director John McCleary.

McCleary said the organization hasn't kept close track of the history of the pins. The tradition started with small buttons people wore to gain admittance to Fur Rendezvous events. As the festival grew, the pins evolved into collectible tokens.

The pins started as simple stamped badges. But starting in the 1960s, the pins began to have more creative shapes with intricate details. Some included a three-dimensional mukluk with a fur ruff in 1978 or a fuzzy walrus complete with tusks in 1969.

In the late 1970s, the collectible pins shifted to a glazed metal design still used today.

There are practical reasons for the switch, McCleary said. There are more people coming to the festival and thousands of pins are produced each year — more than anyone could reasonably make by hand.

McCleary said the festival generally orders 10,000 metal collector pins. Nonprofits throughout Anchorage sell the $8 pins as a fundraiser and keep a 20 percent cut. One of the biggest pin-selling groups is the University Kiwanis Club, a local branch of the national volunteer service group. Jim Huettl, past president of the organization, said Kiwanis raises about $25,000 from pin sales — the organization's largest source of revenue for the year.

Huettl organizes the "Keystone Kops," a group that jokingly prowls Fur Rondy each year putting people who don't wear pins into mock jail.

The "Kops" wear coats and hats covered in the collectible pins. Huettl's own collection dates back to 1971, when he first came to Alaska.

"There is a real mystique about having them every year," Huettl said.

Cindy Pendleton designed pins in 1989 and 2011. She has pins dating back to the 1960s, when she first moved to Alaska. They're reminders of the event through the years, she said.

Pendleton, 72, said while the pins are valued at hundreds or thousands of dollars in Alaska, it's not a market that appears to extend beyond the state. Pendleton sometimes finds Rondy pins at trinket shops in the Lower 48 being sold for only $1.

"It's a regional thing," she said. "But it represents something really special."

Butcher, 76, said her family stopped making the pins after 1966. Her mother-in-law purchased a souvenir shop downtown, and the family didn't have the energy to keep making them. But she still has some of the pins, some finished, others unfinished, at her house.

She has no plans to sell any of them. That, is unless someone has a big collection and really needs one to complete it.