Want to see my adorable mini compass Girl Scout SWAPS?

Wait, you don’t know what Girl Scout SWAPS are? Don’t feel bad if you don’t, I went three decades of my life without ever hearing the term, but all that changed this spring.

You see, in the past year I somehow became a Girl Scout. Yes, I know, it is roughly 30 years after when most girls join the Scouts. It actually happened by accident one day as I was watching some Scouts when a friend of mine was running late. The next thing I know, my daughter and I are “sitting into the meeting” and I blink and somehow we have both joined.

Like everything my daughter does, we have now fully immersed ourselves in the world of Scouts. I have run the flag ceremonies at school, organized and run meetings now numerous times, helped with cookie sales, and at least for a small window of time each meeting, I’m arguably the one who the kids would point to and say that I was in charge. They even somehow convinced me to go camping. In APRIL.

Don’t tell anyone, but it was actually quite fun. I still would prefer the camp in, say, June-July-August-September, but even the rain wasn’t so bad and it was a great bonding experience with my girl.

Until that camping trip was on the books, I had heard nothing of the term SWAPS. But, after my daughter heard all about them, you can bet we dove right into that rabbit hole, too.

What are Girl Scout SWAPS:

From the Girl Scout’s Website- “Girl Scouts often make small tokens of friendship to exchange with the Girl Scouts they meet while traveling. These little gifts are called ”SWAPS,” which stands for “Special Whatchamacallits Affectionately Pinned Somewhere.”

Basically, SWAPS are small little arts and crafts that Girl Scouts make that can be attached to a safety pin. Once they are made, they can then be traded at Girl Scout meetups and encampments as a sign and token of friendship. In essence, they are an excuse to make a large amount of adorable miniature art projects. Sign me up!

We made quite a few SWAPS before we left for camp and I’m going to be sharing them slowly over the course of the next few months. Here’s our first SWAPS project for you, complete with printable so you can make your own mini compass SWAPS for Girl Scouts.

Girl Scout SWAPS mini compass SWAPS

Aren’t they just adorable? The Girl Scouts all went crazy for them and I know for a fact that my kids have stashed a few of these away for their American Girl dolls. Not that I blame them.

Making them is simple – you just have to decide what you can find to be the base of your compass. We used super cheap jewelry findings for making kids jewelry, but you can use bottle caps or any number of small findings. Once you decide on the size, you simply print out this printable to the corresponding size.

Compass printable

For our compasses we used really small jewelry blanks, so I printed this out at 5×7. For bottle caps, I would recommend an 8×10 size. Hopefully that’s helpful as you decide what size to print yours.

After the page was printed, we then just cut them out with scissors and then glued them into the findings. Easy peasy. If you’d like, you can attach a jump ring to connect the compass with the safety pin, but you don’t need to unless you really need the SWAPS to lay flat.