Scout Patch Collectors

Sunday Scouting Hot Finds Newsletter May 3, 2015

For a long time now I’ve had intentions of filming some short beginner videos to help coach up some of the new collectors in the hobby. Not surprisingly this has remained on my to-do list for more than a year now. So I finally got the idea that Brad England and I can include that as a segment in our Thread Heads show. Hopefully the episode that comes out this week will include that and I’m looking for some ideas.

For starters I’m going to review the list of items that are on the ISCA website. I believe Warren Kuhfeld helped lead this effort up several years ago. Taken as a whole the topics are a great starter kit for collectors. However, as PDFs they are not easy to find in a Google Search. So I’ll start off by paying homage to what has already been done and pick it up from there.

Some questions I’ve received from young collectors on Facebook have given me some ideas on this too. Recently someone asked, “What’s the Blue Book”. That one hit me because I realized it’s something that has not been updated in probably 10 years but we talk about it like everybody knows how it fits into the hobby.

I know several people have authored handouts for various classes including Collections Merit Badge that you could call a beginners guide to patch collecting. That would be a bigger project but that thought has also crossed my mind. However, youth these days are much more into consumable videos they can watch on their smart phone than anything that resembles a printed book.

I met a lot of Scouts who’s entire patch collection could fit into a sandwich bag at the conclaves I attended in April. I think something like this could give them a little push. So stay tuned for next week’s episode of Thread Heads and we will kick off the series.

CLICK HERE TO OPEN THE MAY 3, 2015 ISSUE OF THE SCOUTING HOT FINDS NEWSLETTER