Helping the Dingoes

One of the patrols in DH's troop is "the Flaming Dingoes"  For their patrol patch, they order the Dingo patrol patch from Australia.  And then they augment it with flames.  Recently, they put a call out to troop parents to take a few home and add the fire.  Frankly, this is a job that the boys should be able to do themselves.  In the spirit of see one, do one, teach one, this is how I did mine:

1.  I found orange, red, and yellow embroidery floss that looked nice and fire-y.  It is from the stash of floss from my co-worker, but it would be inexpensive to buy.  I had to wind these onto bobbins - not a huge task and totally worth the time.  I used a regular sharp hand-sewing needle and two strands of the floss (it is composed of six strands spun together, but once you cut a length of floss, it is easy to unspin it to get 1 to 6 strands together.  So, anyway, I used two strands held together, but looped it through the needle so that both ends of the floss were tied together in an overhand knot, effectively giving me 4 strands of width when sewing.  When the thread on the needle runs out, un-spin another two strands from the cut floss that you saved.
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2.  I started with red on the first ones, but later I started with the inside colors.  So, the first sewing was to sew little carats (^) with the red.  I did this by sewing all of the / (right leaning) stitches and then coming back to sew the \ (left leaning) stitches.  When finished the needle should end on the wrong/back side of the work. I used a French knot to secure it and then ran it through between the back side of the stitches and the patch and then cut the thread so that there was not a big end hanging.  (Instead of running the French knot back to the front side of the patch, I run it around the back side thread.  An overhand knot or two would probably do the trick instead of the French knot.)



3.  Next I took the fill color (orange) and sewed in the shape of a ' to fill in the red carat, starting and finishing the same way.



On later patches, I did the work in the other order, starting with the little ' of fill color (using both orange and yellow next to each other), then putting the carats around it.  There are a lot of right answers with this project.

To do this together as a patrol, you could split up the work so one Scout did red, one did yellow, and one did orange.