A leader that I know that lives in another state came up with a great project for her girls. They want to collect state-themed SWAPs from every state. After researching Washington state, I came up with a great SWAP idea. I didn't want to do something too obvious (tree, apple, rain, etc.), so I found out that the state insect here is the Common Green Darner dragonfly. I wanted to allow for creativity, so I just asked them to do dragonflies. I thought they'd get too bored making the exact same thing over and over. We made nearly 100 of these. Well, my troop made about 20 and my kids and I finished them over spring break. We also were able to use this as the craft portion of the Brownies Bugs Badge. I love doing crafts with them, but love it even more when it can tie in with a badge.
I mailed these out a couple of weeks ago. We are expecting SWAPs from 4 different states. So far, we have received SWAPs from Maine. Once we receive them all, I will post pictures of them.
We will see if the other troops send SWAPs in exchange for ours. We haven't had the best of luck with these type of things so far. For part of our World of Girls Journey, we sent Flat Juliettes to about 10 different troops throughout the country. One troop sent ours back with pictures of what they did. One troop has become our sister troop this year and we have written pen pal letters and sent little gifts back and forth. We never heard back from the other 8 or so troops.
Thanks for reading!
~ Vanessa
