how to make beanbags

I had this strip of material left over from making a cushion cover a couple of years ago, which I kept because it's good material, but had no idea what to do with. Well I decided to make little beanbags for the sprogs out of it :) If you'd like to make some too, then here's how.

Take your material:

 

And cut it into pieces, size depends on how big you want your beanbags. Here is the first piece of material I cut:

I ended up with 8 pieces:

I folded each piece in half so that the outside was against itself then pinned the edges and stitched them with a running stitch (you can do it by hand but I used the sewing machine):

Make sure to leave yourself a gap, so that you can turn it round to be right side out, and so that you can fill it up with beans/rice/lentils/whatever. Then fill it up :)

When they're filled as full as you want, stitch the hole up. It's not necessary, but I went around the edges of the outside to give them a neater finish.

At this point I must be very clear. DO NOT try to stitch a pretty edge on with the beans in like I did at first. Bad move. There was swearing and grinding of teeth and I broke one of the needles on my mum's sewing machine (sorry mum!). Take the beans out, sew 3 sides, then fill it back up again and tack the beans away from the fourth edge and then sew it up. It's a pain in the butt, but better than throwing your lovingly homemade beanbags out of the window in a rage.

Imade 4 each of various sizes, just because I thought that would be nice. With hindsight I probably wouldn't bother doing that again as the extra effort it took wasn't really worth it imo. Anyway here are my variously sized beanbags, all finished and ready to play with:

Of course, as soon as they were done, the sprogs said "wow, cool!" and then studiously ignored them. Sigh. But I'm sure they'll use them at some point. And I used up that scrap of material, so it was worth it in my eyes. Sort of. Sorry again mum about the needle...