BADGE COLLECTING

The easiest and most common form of collecting of Scout items for most people are badges. These can started to be colected as soon as a person joins Scouts, in the form of Event Badges etc as well as section badges when they move sections. An excellent source of increasing your badges in your collection is to swap them with other Scouts from around the world and the easiest way to do this is to attend an International Event such as a Jamboree, where swapping is a major event that runs along side the activities and helps provide a lasting memorey of the event , another way is to join the International Badgers Club a club that is dedicated to the swapping of both Scout and Guide Badges. The Badgers club provide catalouges that list all badges that can be collected from vairious countries.

Most people will sew their badges on to what is called a Campfire Blanket and people who have been involved in the Scouts for sometime will have large colourfull blankets with all sorts of badges on them from all corners of the world. The really dedicated collector of badges willl rather tahn sewing their badges on to a blanket will store them in plastic sleaves.

For the real keen collector there is the oportunity to collect rare and extinct badges as well as vairities of the same badge where there may be a slight differnce in thread colour for example between to badges which outwardly look the same, another example of a rareity is a Badge that has a printing error on it, thou the badge may have been withdrawn from circulation, some always find their way in to the hands of collectors. An example of one of theese printing errors occured in New Zealand in the late 80's early 90's, New Zealand issued a badge depicting the New Zealand Flag with the words New Zealand underneath that was worn by all members of the movement overthere. one of the first batches of the badge had an error with the Union Flag in the top lefthand corner. The two badges are shown below, can you spot the error?, No? Have a look at the badge on the left and have a look at the diagonal red cross, the part of the cross that goes from bottom left to top right is in a straight line rathjer than being off set as in the one on the right, These badges were recalled but some badge secretaries hang on to them and sold them to leaders as collectors items.

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