Moldfest!

 

That's right: Moldfest! 

I know it sounds to the uninitiated like an event that might go along with Mildew-mania or Radon-a-rama, but no, it was the second annual Mold-A-Rama/Mold-A-Matic enthusiasts gathering in Berwyn Illinois where fans of the fun waxy figures can meet and share and trade to help fill out one another's collections. 

We only happened to learn about the existence of the event a little over a week before it took place on Saturday, Aug 9th. I've been struggling to get our machine working after years of neglect, and I finally discovered a Facebook group where collectors meet, and asked for help. A couple of very nice people who own private machines themselves offered advice and answered questions. One of them asked if we were planning to come to Moldfest. Who knew?! We rearranged our vacation plans to include a stop at Moldfest on our way to Michigan, and we loved it.

To have things to possibly trade at Moldfest, we took a trip to the Milwaukee County Zoo, since they had a couple of new figures there anyway that we wanted. 

Our zoo is also in the process of closing its Small Mammals building, which is a shame because it's always been our favorite. It's the only place we've ever seen with a bat mold, so we wanted a couple of extras. Sadly the machine was not prepared to make a few in rapid succession and they devolved! (Which is simply amusing to display, so we're fine with it.)

 

 

The completely new figure from our zoo was the flamingos, and the stegosaurus, penguin, rhino and hippo are repeats in new colors.

 

In general, we've lapsed in our Mold-A-Rama hunting since the few places left we know of that we want to collect from are a bit far. Oklahoma City Zoo, for example, could be an easy weekend trip if not for the dog, and a trip there in summer sounds really hot. Maybe we'll figure it out for spring break?

In preparation for Moldfest we decided to literally dust off our collection of over 200 figures on our mantel and see what we have from where already. 

 

In doing so, we discovered that black Sharpie can fade completely away on that material. We mark the dates and places of where we obtain our Mold-a-Ramas on the bottoms of each figure in either silver or black depending on the color. Silver lasted, black did not. So Quinn went back through my blog posts to determine missing information to remark figures that needed it in silver.  

She also pointed out that I have not been good at documenting any acquisitions since Covid, so I'm going to take a moment now to catch up!

One of the challenges of collecting Mold-A-Ramas is that they come and go from certain locations. Brookfield Zoo is always reliable. But apparently the couple we picked up from The Dells we were smart to get when we did because they are gone again. Driving my oldest daughter back and forth to UW Stout includes passing The Dells, so in April of 2022 after visiting her for Easter on campus, the rest of us stopped at the Kalahari resort/water park to grab this elephant and giraffe.

 

In June of 2022 Mona and I visited our own zoo again to pick up this blue eagle, green otter, and silver seahorse. I don't know why our zoo did the seahorse, but it's my favorite so I'm glad! 

For Mona's birthday in 2022 we spent the day at MOSI in Chicago to visit an official Mold-A-Rama show! I intended to write a post about it, because it was great to see Mold-A-Rama history on display. Unfortunately I had a computer disaster and lost a ton of photos from that year. (Which included such memories as when we first met and adopted our dog, Domino, so I'm still sad about that.) A Mold-A-Rama show post with no photos didn't seem worth doing so it never happened.

At that event we picked up a white angel (which was finally explained to us as being an ornament, so I am not quite as irritated that it doesn't stand up well), green Christmas tree, green monorail (which is odd and always looks like a caterpillar to me at first glance), yellow chicks, blue ships, red Santa, and silver robot.

 

In June of this year, Quinn and I were in Detroit to spend time with my mom to help her recover from surgery, and we had the chance to finally visit Third Man Records at that location. It's ridiculous that we already had the Third Man figure (of one of Jack White's guitars) from Nashville, and didn't have the one from Detroit considering how often we're there. The Detroit Third Man machine makes a yellow truck.

 

Okay, back to Moldfest!

 

What a delight to be among other people with the same goofy obsession. Many people seem confused as to why collecting Mold-A-Ramas is appealing, but we didn't have to explain it to anyone that day in Berwyn. I even got to meet a woman in person from Tennessee that we sent figures to years ago, including a messed up corythosaurus (she likes the goof-ups) from our own machine, to help fill out her collection. Julie's long since surpassed us with over 600 unique figures, and I love knowing things we sent her are in that display.

Admission included a specially marked "Moldfest 2025" figure (choice of non-waving gorilla or piggy bank) and a BBQ buffet lunch. Quinn and I picked up t-shirts, a Moldfest T-Rex, and although there were some figures we didn't have that were available for sale or trade from other collectors, the fun for us is really in getting them ourselves as part of a family travel adventure.

The few figures we brought from our zoo weren't of interest to the kind of hardcore collectors (over 100 and from ten states!) that were in attendance at Moldfest, but we decided they fit in well with the things on the mantel at the cottage where we were ultimately headed.

A couple of days before we went to Moldfest, we were able to connect with a nice guy at a local hydraulic repair business who seemed intrigued by our machine. He took parts of it away to tinker with and use as a teaching tool for an apprentice, and the goal is to have the whole thing working again by spring. If we couldn't find someone in our area, we were prepared to drive our machine for a total rehab down in Florida, but with luck we won't have to do that. On the brief occasions where we've gotten it to work well enough for people use outside our store, it's been such a delight. At this point I just want the machine to be reliable enough that we can put it out on nice weekends, and we want to proceed with getting our own mold ideas made.

 

Aden has been playing with designs for a violin figure. It would be nice if the mold could include a bow, but that may be too complicated. We were able to take a 3D printed prototype to Moldfest where we got advice about how different parts need to be angled to work correctly, and now Aden's starting over with a fresh design that ticks more of the boxes we need before we can approach a mold maker.

 

It would be exciting to actually offer up a violin mold! If it works, we may create a Domino mold next. Maybe a little figure of her perched in her dog bed the way she hangs out in the window. Lots of possibilities, many of which I'm sure would be a hit at a future Moldfest. We'll let you know when we reach that step!

Who's a good little mold model? Yes you are!

 

Cube Club

I have a cube collection--Meaning a collection of puzzles centered around Rubik's cubes.

I remember very clearly when Rubik's cubes arrived in the United States in the early 80s.  I wanted one.  It spoke to me in a way few things did.  I liked that it was colorful and compact and could fit nicely in your hands.  I liked that it was something that would take time to figure out.

I also come from a family of collectors, so in my home growing up it was accepted and even encouraged that if you liked something for you to collect and save anything related to it.  So I didn't just have a cube and a solution book, I had all the cubes and all the solution books I could find.

Surprise Mold-A-Rama!

When my mom was visiting recently we took her on her first visit to the Milwaukee County Zoo, and what did we stumble across?  A new Mold-A-Rama!  One we've never seen before anywhere:  A cow!

How cool is that?  We knew they had a hippo now (a rare figure--we only have one other that we found in Florida on our big Mold-A-Rama road trip) because Aden picked one up for the family collection when she was at the zoo on a field trip last month.

Mold-A-Rama Update

We're still waiting for warmer weather to want to work on our own Mold-A-Rama machine (which has a leak we need to fix, and there is still the problem of the coin return that shoots money back inside the machine), but in the meantime we got an unexpected addition to our collection!

Last year I was contacted by someone in Tennessee who came across my blog and said she collected Mold-A-Ramas, and would we be willing to trade?  I told her we liked the fun of going to the places and getting them ourselves, but that if she paid us back we'd be happy to pick things up in our area of the country and send them to her.  We ended up getting her figures from our zoo here in Milwaukee, along with things from Toledo, Detroit, and Chicago.  (Someday we will get to the Como Park Zoo and we'll be sure to pick her up some more there.)

She was pleased with the box of Mold-A-Ramas we sent her, and the other day (right around my birthday no less) we got a surprise package from her!  Four retired figures from the Knoxville Zoo that we wouldn't be able to get anyway, even if we visited, including a chimp we've never seen before:

On the Mold-A-Rama Map! (Well, Almost)

Korinthian Violins is now the proud owner of our very own Mold-A-Rama machine!

Although, technically, that's not quite true because Mold-A-Rama is a trademarked term used by the Mold-A-Rama company which operates machines in the Midwest.  Machines not leased and maintained by that particular company tend to go under the name "Mold-A-Matic" (which is how most of the machines we saw on our Florida trip were labeled), but they are all vintage machines from the early 1960s.  They are hard-working antiques that still delight many.  They certainly delight us!

Our machine was salvaged from the group of neglected and damaged Mold-A-Matics that we encountered at the Knoxville Zoo.  I essentially said in my blog post about our Knoxville visit that this seemed to be where Mold-A-Ramas went to die.  If you'd asked me when I started blogging what I might achieve through this medium, getting the Mold-A-Rama machines replaced at the Knoxville Zoo would not have ever come to mind.  And yet, when people who care about these machines saw my post, wheels were set in motion to remedy the situation, and as a result I was offered the opportunity to buy one of the neglected machines "as is" at a steep discount.

How could I say no?

Well, any reasonable person could say no.  My husband could have easily said no.  But the poor man is married to me and OH MY GOD WE COULD HAVE OUR VERY OWN MOLD-A-RAMA MACHINE AND I WANT IT SO SO SO MUCH!!!! and he loves me and here we are and we have zero advertising budget now for the store from here until forever but I don't care.  We only have to sell about, I don't know, 2000 plastic figures to break even on the thing, but that could happen, right?  Sure.

In the meantime this is so cool.  We get to be on the Mold-A-Rama map!  Or the Mold-A-Matic map.  Or whatever. 

Mold-A-Ramas at the Imagination Station

A couple of days after our trip to the Toledo Zoo, we did another day trip from Detroit back to Toledo to collect Mold-A-Ramas at the Imagination Station.

Parking was confusing, but the science center itself was good.  At first we thought our kids were a little old for it.  We walked through a few simple displays that weren't particularly inspiring, and then decided to have lunch.  The food was good and not too expensive and we got to eat outdoors with a view of the river.  Afterward the kids went exploring on their own and my mom and I were going to be content with sitting outside and reading.

But then I decided to check on the kids and discovered the deeper you went into the Imagination Station the more interesting it got.  I found Quinn by a mesmerizing display that involved a spinning disk and lots of sand that you could manipulate with brushes and sticks to create patterns.  We probably could have done that all day.

Mold-A-Ramas at Maker Faire Detroit and the Toledo Zoo

After my week home alone while Ian took our kids and niece off to the cottage, we've switched places and now he's manning home and business while I'm on vacation.  I had a few lovely days up in the woods, and then we headed for Detroit to spend some fun time with my parents.

My brother, Arno, suggested we visit the Maker Faire event going on at the Henry Ford Museum.  It's a wacky sort of happening.  There was a cupcake zipping around that kept getting shot at by an air cannon full of stuffed animals.  There were all kinds of wheels to try.  Aden got a knitting lesson.  All my kids got to carve rubber stamps.  There were tons of 3D printers in action (one using Nutella instead of plastic).  

Following Uncle Arno anywhere....

This guy.

Quinn in a super big wheel

Motorized cupcake on the run!

Aden with 3D printed skull

Even though Mold-A-Ramas were not an official part of Maker Faire, the Henry Ford Museum has ten of them, including a new one we didn't get last year, so we were excited to pick it up.  And the really funny thing was that many people manning the high tech 3D printer booths wanted to ask us about the Mold-A-Ramas we were carrying around and thought they were incredibly cool.

Filling in Gaps

Either you are a collector or you aren't.  It's an irrational tendency disguised by order.  Some of us simply derive deep satisfaction from grouping items until they seem to create something complete.  In its healthy forms it's admirable (as in assembling collections of art or insects, etc. for learning and appreciation), and in its unhealthy forms it's a sickness (as in hoarding and obsession.)  Any of us with the desire to collect must struggle with what we think we want vs what is reasonable (in terms of space and expense and sanity).

I remember one of my brothers telling me he blamed Bert from Sesame Street for his own bottle cap collection as a child, because there was an episode where Bert placed the last bottle cap in the gap in his perfectly mounted collection and was happy.  It looked so simple!  So my brother began collecting bottle caps, hoping to achieve that same perfect sense of accomplishment when he had them all, only to discover that you can never have them all.  He had many bottle caps before he realized there would be no perfect sense of completion to that project, and he let that collection go.

I grew up in a home of many collections.  My husband whose home had more limited space did not.  He's content to read everything on a Kindle, but I prefer real books that I can then add to my shelves.  He doesn't crave physical reminders of places and events the way I do.  His needs require far less storage than mine, and there are days I envy that.  Especially as I watch my children attempt to save everything from everywhere and it becomes harder and harder to organize the clutter.  I don't have much of a leg to stand on when I find my own rocks or Rubik's cubes impossible to part with, but find their bottle collections or piles of perler bead creations hard to bear.

But collecting, when managed properly, is fun.  Our family Mold-A-Rama collection is fun.  And when a collection reaches a certain size it becomes less about amassing things and more about filling in gaps.  We'll never reach that perfect Bert moment of popping that last piece into place, but as we focus in on finding the things farther out of reach there is real satisfaction to placing figures on our shelves that are odd or harder to get.

Mold-A-Ramas at Weeki Wachee

On our last day in Florida we spent an entire morning at Siesta Key Beach.  It was warm and lovely.  I got to read and look for shells, the kids mostly played on the water's edge building structures out of sand and trying to protect them from the incoming tide.

But we knew a storm was coming, one that was predicted to cause more problems for the roads Georgia, and by the time we got moving on our way we could see the clouds to the north and feel the temperature drop.

However, we had one more stop to make on our way out of Florida: Weeki Wachee.

If you've been keeping score on this account of our Mold-A-Rama Road Trip, you'll know we had picked up 57 of the total 59 Mold-A-Ramas by then.  The last two were to be found at Weeki Wachee, and we worked for those last two.  (If you can call any experience that's essentially visiting a vending machine "work," but as far as this adventure goes we wrapped up with some suspense!)

Weeki Wachee is an old-school kind of Florida attraction.  They have a natural spring that forms a big pool that they've dug theater seats down alongside so you can look into it like a giant fishbowl.  Inside are fish and turtles, and during showtimes there are mermaids!

We arrived at (the deserted looking) Weeki Wachee right before 3:00.  When I asked at the ticket counter when the next mermaid show was, she said the last one started in three minutes.  We hurriedly paid our admission and ran to the theater.  We settled into our seats just as the curtains revealed the underwater stage and the performance of The Little Mermaid began.

Women in mermaid costumes appeared.  They "sang," they swam, they smiled as their long hair floated about their faces in the water.  During scene changes they ran bubbles up the windows to act as a curtain.  It was all both silly and mesmerizing.

Mold-A-Ramas at Busch Gardens and the Mote Aquarium

After our whirlwind day in Tampa, the next two stops on our Mold-A-Rama Road Trip in Florida were Busch Gardens and the Mote Aquarium.  Busch Gardens was Mona's chosen spot where she got to dictate the length of our stay, so we got an early start and hit the park right when it opened.

I will admit, Busch Gardens was the one place on our list I was not looking forward to going.  I pictured an over-hyped tacky amusement park, and (for us) it's prohibitively expensive.  I questioned whether it was worth spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars in order to procure a half a dozen Mold-A-Rama figures.  But for the whole trip we traveled as frugally as we could, eating mostly peanut butter sandwiches in the car and staying with friends or in hotels that took coupons, so we decided we could afford to have this be our big splurge.

It turns out Busch Gardens is great.

Mold-A-Ramas In Tampa

We are nearing the end of this journey, I swear!  But not quite yet.

Next on our Mold-A-Rama Road Trip (after Knoxville, Orlando, and Miami) we hit Sarasota and Tampa.  We were lucky enough to stay with friends in Sarasota for three nights and commute to the places we wanted to visit.

The first place we tried to go was the Mote Aquarium, which was only a few miles from where we were staying, but I got mixed up about the times and we were there an hour early.  We asked the kids if they wanted to wait, or wanted to head somewhere else.  They surprised me by asking if they could get back in the car and watch a movie.  I was sure they'd want to be anywhere but the car at that point, but I didn't mind the idea of taking a walk and then reading for a bit if the kids wanted to curl up together and watch Spirited Away again.  However, the DVD player had other ideas and started spewing smoke (?!) so Ian and I declared it was time to roll.

We headed for the Lowry Park Zoo. (I think it was half off with our reciprocal zoo membership if I'm remembering right.)

It's a pleasant zoo.  It was one of our "zip through" locations so we didn't spend a huge amount of time there, but we did see a good raptor show that included trained chickens and an owl that flew over our heads.  We learned that whenever you hear a bald eagle on TV or in the movies doing a big cawing-screech sound it's really a red-tailed hawk call dubbed in.  Bald eagles make a cute little chirpy noise, but that's not as impressive in a big patriotic moment.  Another thing we learned was that great horned owls have no sense of smell so they eat skunks.

We also saw a clouded leopard, and we bought some overpriced popcorn that came in a bucket that has turned out to be incredibly handy for carrying snacks.

Mold-A-Ramas in the Miami Area (the Museum of Discovery and Science, Zoo Miami, Monkey Jungle, and Seaquarium)

In the continuing (and are you thinking endless?) saga of our Mold-A-Rama Road Trip, we went from Orlando down to Delray Beach to visit my aunt and uncle, and on our way south stopped in Ft Lauderdale for a quick trip to the Museum of Discovery and Science.  It was free with our reciprocal membership to Discovery World here in Milwaukee, and we spent a couple of hours there.

It's a small science museum, but what they had they did well.  We saw our first spiny lobster, and they also had fish and turtles.  The giant shark sculpture was kind of cool.  The second floor had a lot of puzzles to solve, which kept us busy, and they also had an exhibit on "fear" which was interesting.  They had a great screen where you had to use your shadow to catch fruit falling from a tree without being attacked by a shadow lion.  Quinn was amused to pieces antagonizing that virtual cat and happily did that until closing time.

There was one Mold-A-Rama machine at the Museum of Discovery and Science, and that's where we got our second fighter jet.

Mold-A-Ramas at Central Florida Zoo, Wonderworks, and Gatorland

After Knoxville, and a night in the southern end of Georgia, we headed on to the Orlando area part of our Mold-A-Rama Road Trip where we had three stops to make.

Our first stop in Florida (after the Visitor Center and its free orange juice) was the Central Florida Zoo in Sanford.  It's got to be hard to be any kind of small attraction near Orlando, and it's a very small zoo, but we liked it.  It will always hold a special place in our hearts for being the first place where we touched a palm tree, and for giving us our first moments of real warmth during a truly miserable winter.

The zoo was small enough that nearly every animal in it was pictured on the map, and the only large animal they had was a rhino.  They were getting ready to open a giraffe exhibit, and we actually saw the trailer pulling up with the giraffe delivery as we were leaving!  They had the smallest amphibian display we've ever seen.  There was a tiny building with a door, and when we opened it we realized that little space with a wall with four or five tiny windows in it was the whole thing.  It was like a mini-zoo, but everything was nicely displayed and well-maintained.  All of it was built on boardwalks, and there were covered areas strewn about to hide from the sporadic rainstorms.

We also saw this on our way into the park which we found interesting:

Mold-A-Rama Road Trip!

I come from a family of collectors.  I have most certainly passed that gene along to my children.  (My husband, poor man, is surrounded by other people's "precious" things, but at least we are unlikely to move again anytime in the foreseeable future, so he won't have to suffer lifting endless boxes of books and rocks.  Every time we've moved books he's paused to show me how light his library card is.)  There is something satisfying about filling in gaps in a collection, and something oddly comforting about seeing evidence of experiences you've had all lined up on a shelf.

Mold-A-Ramas across the mantle

Our Mold-A-Rama collection is the first one we've tried to do as a family and it's been incredibly fun.  Mold-A-Rama figures are not expensive, they're silly, they are just rare enough to be exciting, and best of all the pursuit of them has taken us to interesting places we otherwise would have never gone.

Which brings us to our trip to Florida.

When we first looked at the map of places one can find Mold-A-Ramas we essentially wrote off most of them as impossible.  We would collect what we could in the Midwest, and maybe eventually hit the one location out on the West Coast on a visit to relatives that direction, but anywhere in the South?  Why would we go there?

But then we began to think, why not go there? 

It sparked an idea.  An idea that led us to escape the brutal Wisconsin winter for a couple of weeks and enjoy some wonderful time together.  We weren't sure we could hit everything on our list, but we aimed to try, and we succeeded!  Two places were closed this time of year (Adventure Island in Tampa supposedly has one Mold-A-Rama machine, and some kind of Microcar Museum in Georgia we think has four), but everything else we knew of that was open we got to.  Our list included:

Mold-A-Ramas at the Museum of Science and Industry

As part of an extended birthday celebration for Mona over Thanksgiving weekend we took a couple of trips down to Chicago.  The first was with relatives to the Field Museum, and the second was after the guests left and just our little family went to the Museum of Science and Industry.  That was where we sought out the last set of Mold-A-Rama machines we know of in Chicago.  Mona declared it the best birthday destination ever.

The Museum of Science and Industry is a spectacular place.  It was all decked out for Christmas with sparkling trees and lights everywhere, so it was particularly festive.  There was so much to touch and marvel at, and now that we know we can get in free with our reciprocal membership to our own science museum we will go back!  (Although, to get into the submarine or the mine exhibit we'll have to buy tickets next time.)

Plasma balls, baby chicks hatching, an enormous train set, and a little kids' area called The Idea Factory with water guns and plastic balls that none of my children felt too old for.  I even got some Christmas shopping done in the gift shop, so life was good all around.