Presenting Badges

Jan Schairer
Texas Girl Scout Council
Irving, Texas

Last year, we made 24 corsages for our troop's court of awards...

Materials:

• mum backs (round circles cut out of tagboard or poster board just smaller than the diameter of the mum with a smaller hole in the middle for the flower stem, these can be purchased for about $0.10 each at MJDesigns...or made if you have the time)
• mums - ours were hand made out of plastic garbage bags - they come in all colors - cut a length of the bag about 4" wide fan-fold into 1/2" or so folds, secure with a twistie-tie in the middle of the fold, then fan out - just like the old tissue paper flowers we all use to make!
• ribbon - we used paper ribbon - it doesn't ravel...
• green points were made at the mum-back that stuck out around the mum (Green for Girl Scouts)
• we added 6 streamers - one in each color of each world,
• plus a sixth one of green - gold and silver 'cord' and gold and silver jingle bells (make new friends...)
• really good tape
• stapler

Method:

1. To put together - pre-determine the length of the streamers - ours were appx anywhere from 2 to 3 feet each - determined by # of badges/patches
2. Staple your points onto your mum back
3. Staple your streamers onto your mum back
4. Tie the jingle bells onto the cord, staple cord onto mum back
5. Put the mum into the hole, secure with tape or staple stem in place
6. We stapled the badges and patches onto the streamers I also made labels to put on the back of the mum back that had the year, troop #, girl's name, list of her badges she'd earned and the patches she'd earned.

This was a big success - we still have a couple of girls who have their mum's on their bedroom wall with the badges & patches still on them - they've not taken them off and put them on their vests...