I spent a fairly large part of time today making "SWAPS" for my niece's Girl Scout day camp. "SWAPS" is an acronym for something, but I'm not sure I really care about looking it up at the moment. They're small craft-stuffs that you pin to your vest/sash and the girls, apparently, trade them. This is my first year, so I'm kind of unfamiliar with how the official process works, but whatever.

I started out kinda like this:

Piles of buttons and some of the "bases" are glued together.

These are the backs:


And eventually it all came out like this:


And it doesn't look like crap!*
All it took was: Buttons of various sizes. Metal pins. Felt. Bead/glass glue (for the buttons and the pins). Hot glue (for the felt to cover the base of the pins).

Slightly time consuming, but ultimately rewarding. I left dozens of hair strands in the bead glue/buttons and scalded skin on the hot-glued felt. Some of these are cute enough that I'm tempted to keep a few back for myself.


*I know I'm ridiculously proud of myself when I manage not to screw something up really badly...but if you knew how often I screwed things up really badly, you'd understand.