Arrow of Light Arrow

 

           My son recently recieved his Arrow of Light in cub scouts.  Another boy was recieving his also, so his mom and I coordinated what the arrows would look like.  Since I was busy moving and then out of town, she did some looking online and came across the idea of wrapping the arrow with different colors of embroidery thread to represent awards the boys had earned while in cub scouts.

 

Here's where I took my main inspiration from:

http://www.penturners.org/forum/f45/arrow-light-arrows-webelos-92092/index2.html

http://www.instructables.com/id/Webelos-Career-Arrow/

 

The embroidery floos colors I used were (I just picked all of mine up at JoAnn's):

yellow #726 - Bobcat

red #321 - Wolf

gold #729- Gold arrow point 

silver #3024- Silver arrow points

light blue #3325 - Bear

gold #729- Gold arrow point

silver #3024- Silver arrow points

Scout brown #3787 - Webelos activity pins earned before Webelos

darker blue #824 - Webelos

Scout brown #3787 - Webelos activity pins earned after Webelos

gold #729- Academic pins  

silver #3024- Sports pins

purple #550 - Religious award

white- Arrow of Light

black #310 - Color band separators

I highly recommend marking out your spacing on paper beforehad so you can see if everything will fit on the arrow of if you'll need to make adjustments.  I had to adjust my increments to be smaller after mapping it all out on paper.   I ended up using 2mm for the black bands that seperated the other colors; 5/8" for Bobcat, Wolf, Bear and Webelos; 6/16" for the gold arrow points and 1/4" for the silver arrow points; Webelos pins were 1/4"; Academic & sports pins were 5mm; and the Religious award and Arrow of Light were 3/4".  The arrow kit was just the basic one you can buy at the scout shop.  I made the arrow and wrapped it in one day.  If you were on the ball, doing it over two or three days might be a better idea.  It takes a bit of time to put the arrow together, two hands are helpful for some of the steps.  And wrapping the embroidery floss around, and around, and around..... takes some patience.

It was nice though to have a "crafty" project to make with and for my son.  I make some many girl things for my daughter sewing and craft wise, it was nice to have something to make for S* that he might actually think is cool and appreciate a little bit.

Now to figure out a way to display it.  I pinned a few ideas on pinterest.  I've asked my SIL to cut some wood out in the shape of the arrow of light emblem, so we'll see what I end up deciding to do.

 

 

Wordle T-shirts

 

For our family trip to Branson, MO with my DH's family, my SIL made these fun t-shirts.  In mid-July my son had a technology camp at the school for a week.  One of their projects was to design an iron on transfer for a t-shirt using a wordle word cloud.   Wordle is something he has used in the past at school, but I'd never played around with it.  After he came home with his shirt I thought it would be the perfect, easy way to design a t-shirt for our trip.  Only, what was I thinking?  I was getting ready to pack up my house and move.  So, I called my SIL and asked if she would have time to do it.  Luckily, she was able to work on them and shop for the shirts.  Maybe next trip we'll be able to work on some shirts together.

So, we used words to describe Branson and the date and family names to get our wordle word cloud.  I think the shirts were from walmart and target.  She had someone print it on the shirt (after all there were 18 of them to make), but we considered using the silhouette to cut out a stencil, my SIL silk screen printing it on, etc...

I think they turned out fun.  We all wore them the days we went to the amusement park, Silver Dollar City.  It made it nice to just be able to look up and spot where the group of blue shirts was at.

 

It's fun to match your whole family, right?

 

 

Here are our Yellowstone tees from two summers ago.

My sister in Utah kindly cut out navy iron on vinyl with her cricut (this was before I had my own silhouette and cricut). Then, she mailed it all to me and I weeded out the unneeded vinyl and ironed the wording on.