What is a camp blanket? Oh, let me tell you about camp blankets! A camp blanket is simply a blanket you use at camp. You wear them around the campfire, sometimes for sitting around the site in the evening when it gets cold, sometimes as a picnic blanket during the day and if it’s not soaked by then, in the conventional way – on your bed.
The theme of this post is “it’s your blanket, do what you want”. Girlguiding has no official rules whatsoever on camp blankets, the Scouts probably don’t either and I’ve never met a leader who’s tried to impose order on them.
What kind of blanket does it need to be?
Any! There are absolutely no rules when it comes to camp blankets. Any colour, any pattern, any fabric. My first one is an elderly tartan woollen one my grandmother gave me when I went on my first camp and which has appeared in some of my baby photos because it’s been in a cupboard for that long. My second (I filled the first a couple of years ago) is the official Senior Section grey fleece blanket which must have been discontinued by at least 2018 and likely earlier. My old Guide leader has a huge grey-beige one of a fabric that I think is a kind of rough wool which she’s had since at least the 70s. My ex-other-Guide leader has a bright blue fleece one from Ikea. It’s 1000% up to you what you choose.
Girlguiding has an “official” fleece blanket in a nice navy edged with the new section icons. It used to do them in section colours from Rainbows, Brownies, Guides and Rangers. Choose or don’t choose, as you prefer. Back in the day, 90% of Guides had the official Guide blanket and that meant you could never tell whose blanket was whose – girls in the same unit have a tendency to have the same badges so you can’t even use those to identify them. These days, you can’t even say “No, that Guide blanket isn’t mine, mine is a Brownie one because I got it when I was a Brownie” because it’s just one multi-section blanket (am I slightly anti the official ones? Yes, but only because I like everyone’s blankets to be different and unique and because I don’t want people to think they have to spend £15 + delivery on a blanket).
On the battle of the fabrics: fleece is softer and lighter and wool is heavier and scratchier. Most people these days have fleece blankets but I’d personally lean towards wool because it has a little more fire resistance. You can’t throw it in the campfire and expect it to come out intact but if a spark from your campfire lands on a fleece blanket, it’ll melt a little bullet hole right through whereas it won’t on a wool one. And on the other hand again, fleece dries quicker than wool but it’ll also be quicker to get wet in the first place – wool isn’t waterproof but it’s reasonably water-resistant.
How do I wear it?
Again, up to you. You can just wrap around you, that’s simplest.
But if you want to wear it hands-free, I have three options.
Number one is to cut a big-ish hole in the middle so you can wear it as a poncho. I don’t like it personally because then it doesn’t function properly as a blanket but it’s up to you. Make it big enough to get your head through but not so big it takes over the entire blanket or falls off your shoulders.
Number 2 is a better compromise on this idea, to cut a big T-shape in the middle so you can wear it as a poncho without cutting a big hole in it. You’ll probably need to hem or blanket-stitch these two designs to stop the blanket fraying around the edges.
Number three is what I went for. I’ve always liked to wrap mine around my shoulders like a cloak but that means at least one hand to hold it there – until it dawned on me to snip a buttonhole and sew on the biggest button I could find.
There are lots of ways of wearing it but these three are the simplest, as far as I know. Let me know if you have another way. Camp blankets are endlessly personalisable and I bet there are people out there using hundreds of other methods.
What badges can I put on it?
You’ve guessed it – any! Camp blankets are a great place to keep old Guiding badges – mine starts with my Rainbow promise badge from around 1990 and goes right up to the badges I do with my own girls nowadays, so never a badge has been lost. Lots of campsites have a commemorative badge and it’s nice to collect those. Guiding has a lot of “fun badges” – a camp blanket is a good place for those. Or any other badges. I have a little line of cathedral badges on my second blanket, a couple of swimming badges, challenge badges I did by myself, Rebel badges. Badges from places I’ve been – I’m gathering quite the little collection of country flags.
Cloth badges are best. Of course you can put metal pin badges on but they’re more likely to fall off and get lost and they’re not the most comfortable things to have in your bed. My metal badges lived on my blanket for a while, then on a camp jacket, then a camp hat and they’re now in a display frame.
By the way, iron-on badges are the devil and cursed be whoever invented them. Iron-on badges only stick if the iron is turned up on maximum, which isn’t good for anything surrounding the badge, including the blanket itself and quite honestly, I’ve so rarely found anything that stuff sticks to in the first place. If you do get it to stick, it starts peeling off again very quickly and the sticky backing is so thick it’s extremely difficult to get a needle through to make sure the thing stays put, which is why there’s an iron-on badge peeling off my red blanket, somewhere around the top-right corner. Girlguiding doesn’t put iron-on backings on its badges but pretty much everyone else does. I know lots of people like to iron their badges on but I think the most secure way to hold them is to make the effort to sew them on.
But again, it’s your blanket. Sewing is most secure but you can iron them on, you can get iron-on stuff that turns an ordinary badge into an iron-on one or you can use fabric glue. If you’re going to sew them on, my personal preference is a thread that matches the border of the badge and then sew around with small neat stitches in a pattern that looks like a lot of spokes. I don’t know what that’s called. Some people prefer to sew so that they catch the badge just underneath the edging, making the stitching invisible, in which case they use whatever thread they have to hand. Some people sew a running stitch just inside the border of the badge – this is my least favourite option. It’s not cheating to put a bit of fabric glue on it to hold it in place while you sew, by the way.
As for where badges go, there are – you’ve guessed it! – no rules. Put them where you like. You can spread them out to look nice and neat or you can squish them up to fit on as many as possible. Some people like to group related ones together. Some like to start on an edge and work their way across. Some just drop them on the blanket and sew them wherever they land. I’ve seen some who’ve done it as a big spiral starting from the middle. I sew mine on so they’re all aligned the same way but I’ve seen plenty who kind of divide it into triangular quarters and then everything is aligned with the edge along the bottom of that quarter, if you follow. The spiral ones tend to use the line of the spiral as the “horizon” and so the badges are aligned in circles. It’s entirely up to you.
Nor do you have to stop at badges. You can put your name on in big fabric letters or fabric paint or whatever, or don’t put your name on it at all. Decorate it with stuff you made – I’ve got a fair few friendship bracelets sewn on mine because small fabric things seem to make sense to go on my blanket for me. I (badly) embroidered the badge of my uni sports club on it and there are random decorations sewn on in pink wool for no real reason. But it’s your big bit of fabric, do what you like with it.
Just don’t forget to take it to camp.