Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Swap banners

One of the things you make, swap and collect when you are a Girl Scout is S.W.A.P.S which stands for Special Whatchamacallits Affectionately Pinned Somewhere.  It's a long standing Girl Scout tradition and pretty much always swapped at encampments, jamborees, summer day and sleep over camp and our council's annual cookie camp. In addition they are always given out by hosting troops at our service unit's annual World Thinking Day event in February.
After 2 years of these events Sunshine and her fellow troop mates have amassed a significant quantity of swaps and with this year's World Thinking Day approaching I decided to make each of the 12 girls in my troop a swap banner to have a place to display them.

With a coupon in hand I was able to purchase the yardage of green felt needed relatively inexpensively for this project. I cut the rectangles in 18" x 36" pieces and proceeded in completing them with some quick finish techniques.

First up was the sleeve for the dowel rod.  I folded over and pinned the correct width....
 ....and then some simple straight line stitching to secure it was all that was needed.
 One hanging sleeve completed.  Then there were 11 more to do.
 Next up was trimming the bottom into a banner shape.  I decided on the angle and length that looked good to me with my trusty ruler and....
 .....made the first cut.  A little mark on the other side to get it to meet up with the first side and another cut was done.
 Viola!  A basic banner.  Now it just needed a few more touches to be complete.
I decided that after all the stitching down work it took to make the troop t-shirts and since these wouldn't be worn and therefore wouldn't be getting the same abuse I wasn't going to spend the time to sew down the letters.  Just fusing them to the fleece was all that I planned to do.  I purchased iron on fabric transfer paper and printed the letters out.  Then it was just a matter of cutting them out and ironing them in place.
The addition of a dowel, a couple of round dowel ends and a string to hang it with and this project was complete.

Sunshine and I then had some fun pinning all the swaps she has collected so far onto it.  It hangs in her room were she loves to look at it and remember the fun times she had at the various events where she received them.  
We know more S.W.A.P.S. are in her future.  In fact she's already picked out the idea for the swap she will make to take to camps this summer.  She has a lot of years of Girl Scouting ahead of her and I'm sure there will be another banner needed eventually.  But for now she's happy to work on filling this one up.