Merit badges

The 2011-2012 academic year is coming to a close.  I always find it a slightly bittersweet time of year;  I am certainly thrilled that the preparation for teaching and marking has ended,  but it is always sad to say goodbye to my best students.  This year I had a wonderful mix of warm, bright, and funny young women working in my lab.  Two of them are finishing their undergraduate degrees and the rest are graduate students in our program.  Last night they all came over for Thai takeout and we played a version of Jeopardy based on the things that had happened in our lab over the past year.  I made them each a giant merit badge to mark their contributions to our research project.

I had a great time making these merit badges.  I was on a strict deadline so I didn't have time to take progress photos, but I plan on making a couple more of them, so I'll do a tutorial if there is interest.  You can see in the photo above that these are monster sized merit badges! Here are some glamour shots of three of them.



 Somehow I didn't get single shots of the owl and the skull, but you can see them here:

Not quite Girl Guide badges, but everyone felt very proud of their accomplishments with these huge things pinned onto their bosoms!  Speaking of Girl Guides, I just finished an hugely entertaining and informative social history book, How the Girl Guides Won the War, about the way Girl Guides played a role in supporting the outcome of World War II.  From the back of the book:  "Using interviews, diaries, and log-books, former Guide [and author Jane] Hampton describes the work that these brave young women undertook -- digging bomb shelters, feeding prisoners of concentration camps in secret, constructing kitchens from bombed-out houses during the Blitz, as well as raising huge sums of money. Their determination and good work simply knew no bounds." Wonderful!