The Double Comb-Over - Girl Scout Awards

One of the problems I have with Girl Scouts is awards and ceremonies.  It's not a problem that I have with Girl Scouts.  It's just something I have been working for a long time on getting right.  I have a bad habit of putting awards + print outs in a baggie and handing them out at the end of the meeting.  Inevitably, they want to open the baggie, look at their awards, touch them, see what they are.  Who can blame them?  Frankly, I'm kind of excited to give them out, so I can hardly ever wait until the end of the meeting, and then someone loses a petal or a piece of the cookie patches or something.

My mom used to cut out trefoils from construction paper write the name of the girl on front and a list of badges on the back.  She attached a ribbon that had all of the badges attached to it.  Then when she did awards, she could hold up the thing and read all of the good stuff that the girl did. 

I tried it when we bridged last fall because we had a lot of awards, and I had to pin stuff on people anway and there was an audience, etc.  And it actually worked well.  I used scrapbook paper, cut out slightly wonky trefoils.  Safety pinned them to the girls.  Nothing got lost, no one got stabbed. 

I found something easier.  It may not be better all the way-- I like the trefoil shape/symbology a lot.  I was getting ready to buy some 12x12" cardstock to do it all again this year, but then I found these journaling tags that were $2 for 24.  (The cardstock was 65c/sheet.)  I got some brown grosgrain ribbon - we're 3rd grade Brownies this year and put this together:


I used pinking shears to cut probably 8" lengths of the ribbon and then chain pieced them on my sewing machine using a largish zig-zag stitch.

Once I had a string of 15 of them, this is what they looked like. 

I cut the little thread in between each badge to separate them, and got this:  back and front views.

For the first one, I just had service stars to attach.  This time, I've got their first journey triangle and early bird registration patches.  Some girls had a preference for which tag they got, but it mostly worked pretty well.  Having a die-cutter thingy to make a tag or a trefoil shape would be an excellent way to do this.