It's SWAP time!

I am so excited about SWAPs this year! We were not able to have a council sponsored cookie rally this year, so the leaders decided to have our own rally and combine it with our SWAP. The theme of the SWAP is cookies. My girls made Cookie Monster!

I was fortunate enough to have my co-leader, Katie, cut out the little discs of brown cardstock on her new Cricut machine. Then using a hole punch, I made "bite" marks in each cookie (600 of them!) I found the blue pompoms on eBay, although I had to buy in quantity and we will definitely be using them in our crafts for some time.

We are also doing Leader SWAPs, and they don't have to be cookie themed. I decided to make a pin with Juliette Gordon Lowe's portrait on it.

My co-leader, Becke, just had a baby 2 months ago so I knew she wouldn't have time to make her own, so I found this adorable idea online, it's Clippy Longstocking!

And my other co-leader, Katie, works full time so I decided to help her out too. I made these simple Daisy Insignia Tabs in no time at all.

This week I finished sewing the girls' SWAP sashes as well as the 3 leaders' sashes. The girls will be carrying their SWAPs in their fleece water bottle bags. I think we're ready, now we just have to wait for the day of the SWAPs to get here!

2010/2011 Daisy Cookie Exchange

When I planned our troop's Christmas party, I originally planned to have a small cookie exchange in my home and making "cookie" ornaments for the girls to put on their trees at home. Well, after the November leaders' meeting, I felt that I needed to invite the 2 other Daisy troops to our exchange. The girls in the other troops are all new to Girl Scouts this year and I wanted my girls to get to know them, after all, the law says: "...and be a sister to every Girl Scout."

I found a recipe to make play clay and color it with baking cocoa, my goal being that the ornaments look like gingerbread. Here is the recipe from FamilyFun magazine. The ornaments I made were basically a gingerbread girl and tinier gingerbread girl (I have a gingerbread family cookie cutter set.) Since our exchange was Mom & Me, I thought the ornaments should reflect that.

Our original date had to be canceled because of snow and because I had a bad case of the stomach flu. So finally we were able to hold the event after the first of the year. I was excited to have so many RSVPs but I was very upset to discover that I only had 16 usable ornaments -- and 22 RSVPs! At the last minute I went to Wal-Mart and found round treat containers, similar to tupperware that were only 12 for $1.00! So the girls decorated their new treasure boxes -- the funny thing was that exactly 16 girls made it to the exchange so we would have had enough ornaments after all.