When I was young, I really loved being part of guiding. I was also, however, in a military family, which meant that we moved around to all sorts of places. So, I've been in guiding units in four different provinces, from coast to coast. Along the way, I picked up a couple of district patches, which in general lived their lives on my camp hat.

In August 2004, it occurred to me (basically by accident) that if I happened to have two district patches, maybe more of them existed? I went on the internet to find out, and just about fell off my chair when I saw not only that yes, hundreds of them existed, but that there are people out there whose entire hobby is collecting these things! Aha, I thought, now here's a hobby I can relate to. (When I was young, I had all sorts of collections, from stamps to metro tickets to hockey cards to business cards. Yes, I was a 10-year-old who collected business cards for the fun of it.)

So, that's how I got into collecting girl guide patches. It didn't take long though, that I started to get the unsettling feeling that I had no idea where a particular patch was actually from. I wondered, what's it like out in that district? Where did it get its name? What's that landmark on the patch? And from these questions, this site was born. I love my country, and I love my collection and the people I meet, so why not combine the two and make an interesting site for people to visit and see what's behind the patches?