Thursday, December 13, 2012

Easy Fall Neckerchief Slide



I made this for the month of November, but for a variety of reasons, we didn't have time to actually make them with the boys. I thought I'd share it anyway.

I started by cutting three sizes of the same leaf with my Silhouette, then tracing them onto three different colors of felt. The yellow is stiff, and added some structure to the whole thing. I layered the felt leaves, gluing them with my trusty low-temp glue gun, then added some googly eyes. The last step was to glue a section of conduit to the back.


Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Christmas Tree Neckerchief Slide



This was a fairly easy slide, though I need to find some slides that don't involve felt. The boys just aren't that adept at cutting felt. January's slide will be a miniature wood car in honor of the Pinewood Derby, but I haven't come up with anything for February yet.

This should be pretty easy to figure out, but here's what I did. I cut two identical trees out of green felt and stiff brown felt, cutting the trunk off the green tree so the brown trunk showed through. The stiff brown felt kept everything from flopping around. I used my low- temp glue gun and glued the layers together. Then I searched through my button collection for likely "ornaments" and cut some baker's twine for garland. Some more dabs of hot glue, and the tree was decorated. All that was left was gluing a piece of conduit to the back (go here for more details on the conduit).


I forgot to take pictures of the ones the boys made, but here's a picture of the one LMS made (with help from the other den leader).


And yes, I totally made a pink neckerchief for LMS :)

Friday, October 5, 2012

Cub Scout Bat Neckerchief Slide



Not too long ago I was released from my calling as Relief Society president and called as a Cub Scout den leader. I've never done Scouts before, but I'm looking forward to learning new things, which happens with all my callings. I remembered that my mom was a Scout leader for a number of years and that she had quite a collection of neckerchief slides that they had made, so I gave her a call and she sent me some pictures of the slides for visual inspiration.

We'll probably do a new slide each month, which will help the boys build a collection, which is one of their requirements (at least it is for the Wolf Scouts). For our first slide we did an easy bat, which I thought was a good choice for the month of October.

Materials:
Black felt
1.5" black pom poms
.5 or .7mm googly eyes
1/2" conduit, cut into 3/4"long pieces (I used electrical conduit because it was cheaper than pvc pipe, but either would work, and I used a pvc pipe cutter that we already had to cut the pipe. A hacksaw would work also.)
cardstock for wing pattern
low temp hot glue gun (so the boys don't burn themselves)


 Draw a bat wing shape and cut it out of the card stock.

 Using card stock pattern, cut bat wings out of felt. A white marker of some kind would be helpful here. I didn't have one, so I just carefully held the pattern on the felt and cut around it.

 Use the glue gun to glue two googly eyes to a pom pom. I put a tiny dab of glue on the back of the eye, then stuck it to the pom pom.

 Glue the pom pom to the wings.

Then glue the wings to the conduit piece. My conduit had black writing on one side so to hide it I glued the bat wings over it.



All done and ready to be worn!