Scouting around
by Beryl Hales
Have you got a part of your life that surprises other people? Do you do things that they cannot imagine you doing - apart from owning doll's houses, of course? I am about to reveal this part of my life to you. I was a Beaver leader. They are the tiniest Scouts - the little boys who wear the ‘boy-friendly’ light-grey coloured uni- form! No, I’m not an Arkela, that’s Cubs. And dib, dib, dib is not a highly original comment, thank-you. Anyway, it’s dyb - short for ‘do your best’. It was a part of the old ‘grand howl’ - better not to delve any further!
Anyway, when our Scout leader got married to his new wife, an Arkela, not knowing them very well but wanting to give them a present, I went mini-wards, as I often do when stuck for an idea.
Rather than using a plain box, I went for a wedding album/book look alike. This one is made from papier-mache and came from the local craft shop. I painted it with three layers of white acrylic paint, inside and out. (I found that the paint soaked in a lot.) Opening and closing the cover during making meant that unpainted patches appeared in the creases and folds and these required extra doses of paint.
To decorate the outside of the album and the corners on the inside, I used self-adhesive ‘silver’ decorations and lettering. These came from three separate sets of ‘Contour’ stickers - one letters, one corners and straight pieces, and one wedding.
As the box had no fastening, I punched a hole with a leather punch on each side of the opening and threaded a piece of ribbon through each hole. A knot on the inside stopped the ribbon from ‘escaping’ every time the box was opened. The pieces were long enough to be tied into a decorative bow when the box was closed.
I wallpapered the inside of the box and added thin strips of carpet for the ‘floor’. When deciding where to place the shelf and table and on what dimensions they would be, I had to check that they would not touch one another when closing the box. This was also true for the other items I included in the box.
The colour of the Scout World Badge is purple/mauve and this helped me to decide upon the colour scheme for the items inside. For this box I used many bought items - such as the wooden spoon, garter and buttonhole which all had flower trimmings that were absolutely the right colour. The cake just needed its flowers and ribbon repainting with acrylic paint and a fine brush. The white plastic cat, however, had a complete paint transformation!
In my ‘bit’ box I already had some tiny silver horseshoes of the sort that are used as wedding cake decorations. A loop of ribbon superglued to the back and paper flowers stuck with PVA to the front made a pretty ‘good luck’ token. A rolling pin treated the same way gave the groom warning about his future behaviour. The wedding rings are jewellery crimps glued onto a Valentine heart from my Valentine shop!
The cards were courtesy of my trusty PC, which once again provided me with clip-art pictures which could be shrunk to just the right size. I also used my ‘skill’ with the simplest drawing features to make the card with a Cub/Scout on the front.
To add some more personal touches, I included the elephant teapot and tiny elephant ornament (a charm with the loop cut off and the top sanded) as the couple went on honeymoon to Sri Lanka. The folded ‘necker’ is the correct colour for our Scout group, and was cut from fray-checked ribbon. The woggle was a new ‘find’, which I am sure has much potential. It is a plastic bead of the type used to make children’s mosaic pictures that are then ironed to keep the pieces in place.
I had to use a cheat when making the sampler, as I am very poor at framing such sewn items. I bought a suitable size frame, measured the front opening and marked the embroidery fabric so it was just smaller than this opening. I worked the cross-stitch to fit the marked area before Fray-checking this and cutting it out. I glued a piece of mirror card into the frame and glued the sampler to that.
A bottle of champagne, glasses to drink it from and a World Badge cut from a Scout newsletter completed this special present.