Isabella Heads to Girl Scouts with Jewelry Pins to Swap

Last week was busy around the Nunn Household. Both girls were getting ready for Girl Scout Camp! This was the first year that my youngest daughter, Isabella, brought pins for swaps with other girl scouts.

Swaps are small tokens of friendship to exchange with other girls. Swaps stands for “Special Whatchamacallits Affectionately Pinned Somewhere.”

Before I go any further, I need to fully disclose that the finding that Isabella used for her swaps is an item that is a Special Request Order. It was stocked at one time within the Nunn Design Findings Line, but has long been retired from our everyday stocking line. The findings were also in the “these findings are plated really poorly and are yucky, so do not use” box. Don’t tell Isabella, but basically I gave her damaged goods out of the warehouse to create with. Gosh darn it; I had no idea that she would make such awesome swaps! I so regret not giving her the “good stuff!”

Here was Isabella’s process.

Supplies:
Nunn Design Bail Pendants
1/2 “ Circle Images
Nunn Design Glue
Gel du Soleil
Nunn Design Jumprings Grande Circle
Safety pins

Tools:
Paint brush
Scissors

Step 1: Creating the drawings.
Isabella took out her drawing notebook and went to town drawing little kitty cat faces. When a girl scout bridges up into the 6th grade at her camp, they no longer are called by their given name. They take on a camp name. Isabella had selected the name “Bella Gatto”. The first part, “Bella”, is a play off of her full name and “gatto” is Italian for cat.

Step 2:
This part is tricky if you don’t know how to use Photoshop or have the ability to size images, but I took photographs of her drawings and Melissa (our designer diva here at Nunn Design) sized the images to fit the finding and created many images up on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper.

The images were then printed on a Laser Printer.

Step 3:
Next, Isabella trimmed the circles all out by hand with a pair of scissors.

Step 4:
Isabella used Nunn Design Glue to paint a thin coat of glue on the Bail Pendant. She then slid on her illustrations and moved it around until it was centered on the pendant’s flat surface.

Step 5:
Ah, not sure why this is in the photo files for this tutorial, but Isabella’s big sister Emillia did make some muffins for us during this project.

Step 6:
Isabella let the Bail Pendants dry for an hour before applying a second coat of glue on top of the images.

Step 7:
Next Isabella and I did a test to see how easy it would be to apply Gel du Soleil to the Bail Pendants and cure them in the UV Lamp for 20 minutes. We shortly realized that this was going to take us forever, so we just made enough swaps to keep for ourselves using the Gel du Soleil. The remaining swaps were simply left with the glue sealing the image.

Step 8:
Next, Isabella attached the Jumpring Grande Circles and safety pins onto all of the Bail Pendants. The jumprings were easy enough for her to open and close just with her fingers.

Yahoo! 50 swaps were cranked out and no one cried! In fact it was really fun!

I have such great memories of Girl Scout Camp! I’m glad that my girls will too!

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