Arrow of Light / Cub Scout Career Arrows Follow-Up (#100DaysofScouting, Day 15)

(This is a follow-up to my previous post on Arrow of Light / Cub Scout Career Arrows, found here.)

So they’re done.  Finally!  And they look pretty sweet!  Probably because after doing the design, I had NOTHING to do with them after.  That task was undertaken by my lovely wife with the degree in Art!

So I kinda/sorta followed the ways that had been previously published, but we diverted in a few different areas and I think it turned out for the better that way.

First was that I bought the arrows.  I know, there’s plenty of resources out there on how to make arrows, like these instructions from the November 2001 issue of Boys’ Life.  But frankly, my time was worth more than the money of the parents in my den, so we purchased arrows.  There are lots and lots of places to get arrows from, but I settled on the 25″ Agate Tipped arrow from arrow-of-light-awards.com.  The price was not too high and they were in stock with quick shipping, and I liked the look of them.  They are only 25″ long, so it is quite obvious they’re ceremonial (even the smallest Cub Scout bow will be too big to fire it).  They showed up quickly and I was very impressed.

So then the next question was how do I mark the boys’ careers onto these arrows?  Searching the web tells me that there are two main positions on this.  One says to go the sticker route, and there are several places where you can buy pre-cut stickers in the appropriate colors and widths you need.  Or you can go the paint route.  Your nearest craft supply store, heck probably your nearest Megalomart probably has all the colors you need.  But paint can get expensive and can be very messy.  Frankly, I didn’t like either option.

So I went with a third option, which was to use colored embroidery floss wrapped around the shaft, and secured using Aleene’s Brush-On Tacky Glue.  I went to my local Meijer and bought a couple of the packs of embroidery floss where you get 36 skeins of multiple colors for $5 a pack.  I probably could have gotten the colors I needed cheaper by buying individual skeins from Michael’s but at the time I wasn’t sure what colors I was going to use for what.  By buying one of the primary color sets and one of the pastel sets I was able to get every color I needed except something to work for the silver arrow points.  For that we had to go to Michael’s and got a single skein of it there.

So now I had materials (arrows, floss, glue) and manpower (my wife), all I needed was a template and a color scheme.  No brainer on that, right?  There’s a few different variations out there, but most internet searches seem to point to pretty much the exact same pdf file.  But I wasn’t happy with that file.  First, it’s outdated.  This goes back to the days when Tigers weren’t considered full members of the Pack and didn’t earn Bobcat until their Wolf year started.  And there were other awards that I felt were pretty significant that were ignored.  And frankly the spacing used on that pdf file wouldn’t fit on a 25″ arrow if a boy had done a LOT during his Cub Scouting career (and at least one of mine had).  So what was I to do?

Of course, I made my own.  Let it never be said that I’m a conformist.

My feeling is that if you are going to count Arrow Points and Webelos Activity Badges, then you should count Tiger Tracks.  I also think that the Leave No Trace Award and the Good Turn for America Award should be included on the arrow.  Both of these also require an advancement report to be generated.

So we started just after the arrowhead with Bobcat and worked our way down the shaft through the ranks and special awards.  The table below I made to help keep track of Order, Sizing and color:

Cub Scout Career Arrow Order, Colors & Sizes

Badge / Award Name	Thread Color	Size on Arrow
Bobcat Badge	Black (Iris 148)	¾”
Tiger Badge	Orange (Iris 710)	¾”
Tiger Tracks (Elective beads)	Pale Yellow (Iris 323)	1/8” per bead earned
Wolf Badge	Red (Iris 128)	¾”
Wolf Gold Arrow Point	Gold (Iris 421)	½”
Wolf Silver Arrow Points	Silver (DMC 415)	1/8” per arrow point earned
Bear Badge	Aqua (Iris 100)	¾”
Wolf Gold Arrow Point	Gold (Iris 421)	½”
Wolf Silver Arrow Points	Silver (DMC 415)	1/8” per arrow point earned
Webelos Badge	Royal Blue (Iris 398)	¾”
Webelos Activity Badges	White (Iris 144)	1/8” per activity badge earned
Arrow of Light Badge	Bright Yellow (Iris 344)	1-½”
Religious Emblem Award	Tan (Iris 222)	¾”
Leave No Trace Award	Green (Iris ???)	¾”
World Conservation Award	Purple (Iris 755)	¾”
Good Turn for America Award	Red/White/Blue braided (Iris 128 / 144 / 986)	¾”

For the Good Turn for America Award, we tried to find a varigated thread of red, white & blue but couldn’t find anything close.  So Jenny braided the three colors together and it looks really good!  It is only slightly taller off the shaft than the regular floss and really isn’t very noticeable.  I like it!

I asked each family to fill out a quick form to verify what the boy did and didn’t earn, I’ll attach a blank copy.  For all the things they did since Webleos, I had the info because I’ve been the den leader and we’ve used Scouttrack.  But for Tiger, Wolf & Bear, the former den leader kept paper records which were pretty accurate but I wanted confirmation from the families.  And one of my boys was in a different pack before Webelos and transferred to ours later on, so I didn’t have any of his previous records.

I used the data collected from the families for each boy to make a template in Word.  Just made a simple 2 row table and adjusted the column width appropriately for how wide each item should be.  The cell in row one was just filled with that color (or an approximation), and the cell in row 2 I put the actual measurement of how wide the ring should be.  Then I gave it all to my lovely wife, and viola!

So here’s a couple pictures of the Finished Product:

Cub Scout Career Arrow using embroidery floss

Cub Scout Career Arrow using embroidery floss