Tips and Tricks for Sewing on Boy and Girl Scout patches
The easiest one being: convince someone else to do it for you. *winks*
If you don't have a sewing machine, go back to the last statement. The embroidery and gunk that supposedly make the patches "iron-on" (Girl Scouts) are very difficult to hand sew through. Save yourself the frustration and try a dry cleaning shop that offers tailoring, it'll be cheaper than you think.
Still with me? Good. Now look at all your patches. Do you have matching thread for all of the different colors of edge embroidery? No? Here's the trick, you don't need a bazillion colors! All you need is a thread to match the clothing piece (brown for Brownies, navy blue for Cub Scouts, etc) and "invisible" thread. It's nylon instead of cotton and is pretty much thin plastic fishing line wound on a thread holder. Check the quilting department of your fabric store. Use the colored thread for the bobbin and the invisible thread for the top stitching. This saves you so much time because you don't have to keep switching out thread colors as you sew on all the patches.
Next tip: buy some double sided tape. Again it's hard to pin through all the embroidery and iron-on gunk so to keep the patches in place while you sew them, use a little piece of double sided tape. Don't even worry about removing it, it's not going to hurt anything.
For Boy Scouts: those Wolf/Tiger/Bear/etc patches that go over the pocket of the shirt? Just sew through the darn pocket. They never use that pocket anyways.
For Girl Scouts: I know the patches are suppose to be iron-on. And I've actually had pretty good luck with the Brownie Try-It badges staying put. But... Be careful with the iron because repeated ironing in the same section will burn the fabric to a crispy black and create a hole. Course if it's small enough, you can always cover it up later with another Try-It patch. Not that I'd know from experience or anything...
Happy Scouting!
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