Me with my daughters 2018 - Photo Credit: Ali Katzenmyer
I have a couple of sub-pages for some specific uniform things. If you're interested, check out these:
NOTE: The below information is all current as of the July 2018 release of badges. I no longer have all of these badges/vests available to play with layouts. At this time, I have no intention of trying to redo additional placement guides, but I won't remove these because they're still useful for counting up what you think you can fit. :)
Unofficial
Badge Placement Guides
I created all of these pictures because the official uniform placement guides that are supplied by GSUSA are not to scale and do not contain photographs. The clipart style is a great guideline to the basics, but is difficult to utilize when you have very active troops or scouts who are earning every (or nearly every) badge and journey available.
The official placement guides can be found here: GSUSA Uniform Placement Guides 2017
The following pictures are using every current badge available for their level as of July 2018. Not every troop or every girl will do all of the badges, but this will help you figure out how to try to fit things together if you have a G.I.R.L. who has tackled that goal. Side note, if your troop doesn't use a crest, you can squish your troop numbers, stars, and bridges upward and will gain a full row of room for more badges most of the time.
Daisy
I tried a bunch of different layouts and it looks like these 4 might be the cleanest. On a good note, they all still have a little more room to fit whatever comes out next year, too.
Version 1:
I tried to put all of the journeys on the tab side like all the other levels do. It gets realllllly crowded, but it's doable. If you do that, you can either put the Global Action and World Thinking Day patches on the bottom of the other side and still fit 5 staggered rows of 4 (total of 20) flower badges, or you can fit 7 staggered rows of 4 (total of 28) flower badges. There are currently 12 non-journey flower badges, so plenty of room for more if/when they get released.
Version 2:
If I move all of the flower badges to the flag side, it looks a LOT cleaner. You can fit 7 rows of 4 if you stagger them. That does give you enough room to put the Global Action and World Thinking Day badges in a row either right above or right below the original 3 Journeys on the tab side. Or just put the GA and WTD on the back to make it less cluttered. This gives you room for 7 more flower badges if/when they get released.
Version 3:
This is just showing what happens if you don't stagger the badge rows. You still fit 4 across, but now you can only fit 6 rows high instead of 7. This layout only has room to add 3 more flower badges later. I suspect you cannot stagger the rows on the XXS/XS vest, so this layout is probably closest to what that would look like.
Version 4:
If you put the Global Action and World Thinking Day awards on the back, you can put just the Outdoor Journey on the tab side and it doesn't look too disorganized. That leaves you with room to do the full 7 rows of 4 on the flag side. This layout would have room for 10 more flower badges on the flag side. And if you had to, you could still move one of the STEM journeys over as well and put it vertically down the seam.
Out of all of those, I think my favorite is Version #2, either with or without the Global Action and World Thinking Day on the front. (Though I would add the badges in neat rows as they were earned, not have them all spread out like this to show how many would fit.) :)
Brownie
This first example was done on a Medium 10-12 vest. There isn't a consistent direction given for dealing with the new Outdoor Journey. It's built from existing normal badges, and the only shape I could put them in that didn't look really odd was the pyramid that looks like an upside-down WoW Journey. I'm also annoyed that the Take Action Project (TAP) badges for the new journeys aren't pointing down. It makes the new STEM Journeys not fit together at all. Moving on...
With the addition of the 5 badges released in July 2018, I can't get everything to fit on the Medium vest unless I take off the annual World Thinking Day and Global Action badges. Those have to move to the back for this to work. Even then, I had to put the progressive badge sets on the journey side and the Brownie Quest journey will wrap slightly to the back.
This next example is the same set of badges, but this time it's on a Large 14-16 vest. It's a little tight, but everything does fit on the front. I think my personal preference would be to move the World Thinking Day and Global Action awards to the back and use that space to hold a couple of the progressive badge sets so that it wasn't so crowded on the flag side.
Junior
I *think* this one is a Large 14-16 vest, it's definitely smaller than the XL one my daughter has. Again, there isn't a consistent direction given for dealing with the new Outdoor Journey. It's built from existing normal badges, and the official placement guide has them just stuck in with the rest of the normal badges. That doesn't make as much sense to me, so I moved it over to the journey side with the rest of the journeys.
This is the cleanest layout I could get to work, and to do it, 2 of the progressive badge sets had to migrate to the bottom of the journey side.
Cadette Only
I used to have a section here where I showed combined C/S/A vests. The badges released in July 2018 ended up being too much to fit everything on at once. I've moved the C/S/A combined section that I had put together in July 2017 down lower in this page, but moving forward, you just can't fit everything on a Large vest anymore. Many girls already split the khaki vest years into a Cadette Only vest for 3 years followed by a Senior/Ambassador vest for the last 4 years, so that's what I'm going to show in my pictures.
The next 2 examples are just different ways to configure the Leadership in Action (LIA) Awards and playing with placement of the Outdoor and STEM Journeys. The vest is a Large.
Does your Cadette want to use a sash instead? If they're willing to sacrifice fun patches, you can put the journeys and ID patches on the front and the normal badges on the back and everything will fit EXCEPT that you can't get 4 of the new LIAs on the front without tying the knot really, really low.
Senior/Ambassador Only
If you opted for a new vest at the Senior level, here's the example that doesn't include the Cadette badges. We once again have enough room to bring the World Thinking Day and Global Action Awards back to the front. This is again a Large vest.
I also did sash examples for Senior and Ambassador. They can each fit the full set of journeys on the front with the ID patches and all of the normal badges, along with the annual World Thinking Day and Global Action awards, on the back. They work with either the pin version or patch version of the original 3 journeys. The three backwards badges on the top are just to show how much width the normal badges take up. They fit fine.
Cadette, Senior and Ambassador
(Combined)
I'm going to leave these pictures here, even though they're only current through the July 2017 badge release. There were 29 new badges added for the combined Cadette, Senior, and Ambassador levels and you just can't add that much to these vests. If someone is trying to use the same vest for 7 years, these are still good examples for trying to do so, but the examples are a little incomplete. Trying to put 7 years worth of memories onto a single vest is difficult. The khaki vest being used in these pictures is a Large. As mentioned above, the Outdoor Journeys aren't really given a proper placement or merged pattern, so I did my best to make things look nice and fit. That white piece of paper under the wings just says it's the placeholder for pins. You can fit them all in down in that space or up beside the bridges.
These 2 examples are my attempts at getting all of the current badges for all 3 levels onto a single vest. The World Thinking Day and Global Action Awards had to be sacrificed. In a 7-year span from Cadettes through Ambassador, there would be 14 of them, and they just won't fit. If you take those out of the equation, there are 2 moderately neat ways to put together everything else:
Version 1: Cadette stuff goes on the flag side only. Journeys go up under the bridges and wings, and badges build from the bottom. It will make for a very lopsided vest until at least partway through Senior, but it ends up being a much neater total package once everything is done. Senior builds from the bottom up, then Ambassador goes above it. I have the Senior badges overlapped to gain an extra badge per row, but those extra 3 could probably just be moved down to that bottom row and fit just fine. I didn't think of that when I had everything out to play with...
Version 2: Start from the Cadette placement guide and put badges on the bottom of the flag side and journeys on the top of the tab side. When you get to Seniors, start putting the badges at the bottom on the journey side and the journeys can go up above them. I had to overlap the borders on the Senior badges to get an extra badge into each row. There isn't enough space otherwise. When you get to Ambassadors, it all needs to go above the Cadette badges on the flag side.
