Farmgirl Merit Badges

Well, as anyone who knows me can tell you, I am a card carrying member of MaryJane's Farmgirls. This is like a grown-up girlscout group for women and girls all across the country. The badges you can earn all encourage self-sufficiency, waste not want not, old time resourcefulness and frankly, they're just fun. There is an on-line chatroom where all of us farmgirls can chit-chat about whatever is on our minds and while I was checking out the chatter for today I found a post by a wonderful farmgirl (CJ) who was showing off some of her badges. I just loved seeing them as it's interesting to see what each of us does to make our badges. You see, when you earn a badge, they send you a template for it. You can then do whatever you like...embroider it, draw it with puffy paint or fabric pens, whatever! I have embroidered all of mine and CJ had hers mostly embroidered, but her quilting badge was actually quilted - genius! So after seeing CJ's, I thought it would be fun to post my badges here so other farmgirls could see them and get ideas for their own badges, like I did with CJ's.

There are badges for all sorts of things and I don't think any farmgirl has gotten all the badges yet - though I could be wrong. Each badge has a beginner, intermediate and expert level and for my badges, I am marking my level with the dotted like that circles the patch. So on the big picture of all my badges, the ones on the left side of the board are all beginners (one circle) and the right is full of intermediate badges (twice around). I haven't even gotten half of the badges possible yet and I haven't gotten "expert" on any! It's kind of fun to have little goals to focus on while doing whatever project I'm working on. I love to knit, for example, so the beginner and intermediate knitting badges were easy for me to get. Now I have to come up with a project that meets the requirements for the expert level badge! And since I don't want to make something just to make it, I have to also come up with a practical purpose for whatever it is I make. Maybe a complicated blanket pattern for a Christmas gift, or a sweater. It's really a lot of fun

and challenging too. Gives the old brain a workout.

To the left are some close-ups of my favorite badges. The lettuce I loved because I got to use a floss in multiple shades of green and I think it made the vegetable that much cooler. The Horse Dreams badge is supposed to be a pinto, but he looks a little angry to me...I don't know why he came out looking that way. And I LOVE the honey bee! Tricky to embroider because of all the tiny detail, but it came out really cute. The light bulb for Green Energy was a cute concept, I thought and the little bunny in the Backyard Farmer badge is the cutest badge to date!

Once I have gotten a few expert level badges, I will be stitching them together and putting them on my Farmgirl tote bag (since I am the leader of a local chapter, I have a lot of stuff all stashed in a big tote). The pencil lines are denoting where I will stitch them together when the time comes. I just love getting the badges and have so much fun getting them together. I hope you liked seeing them! And if you have been inspired to check out my grown-up girlscout group, you can check it out at www.maryjanesfarm.org.