Mother's Day Project and Finishing a Journey!

We have our last "classroom" meeting of the school year tonight. The girls will be finishing their second journey, "Between Earth and Sky" and receiving their journey patches.

I am excited about our Mother's Day craft tonight. I had bought some old teacup and saucer sets when the service unit was trying to decide what to do for Thinking Day. We ended up not using them and that left me with 9 sets to find a use for. I also have left over GS cookies my troop paid for to use up, so I'm throwing them into the mix. I decided to try making teacup bouquets with the girls.

You will need:
Teacups/Saucers -- they don't have to match
Hot Glue Gun
Styrofoam Balls cut in half -- use a bread knife
Coffee Filters
Spray Bottle of Water
Washable Markers
Plastic Cling Wrap
Popsicle sticks
Cookies
Lollipops

The only prep work that is necessary before your meeting would be to cut the Styrofoam balls in half and to hot glue the cups to the saucers.

To start, give each girl a coffee filter (I have a huge package I got at the dollar store), flatten it out and have them each color a design around the outside edge. Now this is where I recommend having a second adult on hand. If you have a spritz or spray bottle you can just mist the coffee filters with water, it will make the markers run and look very pretty. They dry pretty fast. If you don't have a spray bottle, the girls can lightly flick water drops onto the filter to get the colors to run. This should be done on a paper towel to save the work surface and extra hands can help dab off extra water to speed drying.

I then placed the coffee filter into the teacup, trying to leave a little bit out. Place one of the halved Styrofoam balls into the cup. Depending on the size of the cup and the size of the Styrofoam balls, you may have to put it in dome-up or dome-down. I don't think it really matters which. Press it firmly down in, the coffee filter should create a kind of ruffle around the opening of the teacup.

The next step was to stick the lollipops and cookies in as the "flowers." The lollipops don't need anything done to them but the cookies do. I used 1 cookie with a Popsicle stick and then wrapped it tightly in plastic cling wrap. I considered tearing the cling wrap in advance but then I realized I'd have a huge mess on my hands, so I'm going to draft one of the troop volunteers to tear them off and keep them orderly.

After putting all the "flowers" into my bouquet I was done! It was a fun and easy craft and I hope the girls will really have fun with it. I have a lot of cookies for them to use if they want so the bouquets can be much fuller than the one I have pictured here. The best part is, if the girls want a treat tonight, we'll have cookies on hand!

Our fashion projects are complete!

I am so excited to announce that my girls have finished their fashion projects! Our last project was for each girl to design her own hat to reflect her personality. I was so pleased with how unique each girl's hat was.

If you'd like to see a little description of each girl's design, please just hold your mouse over their picture as it "falls" in the slide show!

A busy month!

We've had a busy month selling Girl Scout cookies, but thankfully I will be turning in the money and reports tomorrow and we'll be officially done. The girls sold very well, exceeding my goals by far.

We celebrated World Thinking Day on February 22nd. I decided to head up the event to help our Event Coordinator. We decided to learn about Fiji, Australia, Mexico, India and Hong Kong. We chose the countries from the list of 145 countries in the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. We made leis for Fiji, paper fans for Hong Kong, Gods Eyes for Mexico, ate Pavlovas for Australia and decorated the girls' hands with "henna" tattoos for India.

We were able to send our pen pal troop in Wisconsin a letter with some SWAPs and a map about South Dakota to help them learn about us. I am excited to read their letter to my troop this week, and to hand out the SWAPs they sent. We also completed our flip-flop slippers, one of the last steps to finishing our Fashion patches. You can see the directions at the FamilyFun website here.

This week I would like to take a break from our journey book and have a review of the Girl Scout Law. We have been having some behavior issues at meetings and events and I would like to remind the girls of how they need to apply the Law to their everyday lives -- that it is not just something we say at the beginning of every meeting. I plan to play a game with the girls, reading situations to them and asking what parts of the Girl Scout Law were broken in each one. There is usually more than one answer and I think the girls will have an easy time figuring it out. For each correct answer I will put a marble into a jar and I will tell the girls if they can finish the game as a team with the jar full to a certain point, they will get a special treat. I will have a treat like cookies on hand to give them before they go home. The real treat will be the patches I have on order from MakingFriends:

To see the situations and answers for the GS Law Quiz, you can download a .pdf file here.

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.

We finished our first journey!

Well, we finished our first Daisy Journey last night! I decided to try to finish Welcome to the Daisy Garden last night because my co-leader, Becke, is close to having her baby, and due to holidays and council events, the troop won't meet again until December. So I thought it would be nice to finish the book while she was still with us (she will be on maternity leave for the rest of the year.)

By finishing our journey book, our newest troop member earned her Daisy petals and the entire troop earned their journey patch. I am working today on sewing my daughter's to her vest. I actually decided to resew most of her fun patches on her vest. I had spaced them liberally and I was worried there may not have been room for the patches we earn this year in scouts. I took the opportunity to fix a few things that were bothering me -- I had sewn her petals on with a variegated rainbow thread that is cute on fun patches but just didn't work on the petals. I usually sew patches on with my sewing machine's zigzag stitch. If I can't match the patch's color with my thread, I try to use a contrasting thread from the patch itself, and if all else fails, I use my rainbow thread. It usually works out pretty well. My theory is, if you're going to see my stitches, then SEE my stitches. On the journey patch though, I decided to sew the background patch on with my machine and then hand-sew the 3 smaller patches on. It is so much easier to hide stitches when they are hand sewn.

Pom-Pom Pumpkins & Scrapbooking Freebies

We finished up our fall sales last weekend. And our troop was about to put over $500 in the bank. I'm so proud of my girls. Our troop meeting this week was a simple one. Since we started the hat/scarf sets last time, we needed to finish this week -- which is good since the weather here in South Dakota has been cold, windy and wet. I decided that the scarves are really a lot of cutting and not a lot of hands on work for the girls, so I asked my co-leader to take the moms and dads into our work room and make finish the scarves while I read Chapter 5 of Welcome to the Daisy Garden to the girls. I loved how the flowers each represent a color of the daisy petals we learned last year! After our reading lesson we started working on our pom-pom pumpkins. I found the idea and directions at domestifluff.com. You can find the directions on that site.

The only thing we changed on the pom-pom pumpkins was that we used green and brown pipe cleaners to tie off the bundle, using the ends to create a stem and curl of vine. I thought the difference in color from the orange yarn would make it easier to keep the girls from accidentally cutting the wrong piece of yarn.

I'd also like to offer a free digital scrapbooking set to anyone who would like it. I tried to encompass all the levels of Girl Scouts with this set: Daisy, Brownie, Junior, Cadette, Senior, Ambassador and Leader. There are bridging embellishments, word art, and Girl Scout awards among other things. The last items to be finished was the "recycled" alpha. I tried to make something that looks like a craft project I might actually make with my girls. I think this alpha really looks like something a Daisy troop could make. Let me know what you think. If you make any layouts, send me a copy and I'll post it if you want.

Please go to my other blog to find the download link.