After watching Kirstie’s Homemade Home my lovely friend Delphine asked me if I could help her make a bean bag for her daughter. I jumped at this occasion as I have been wanting to make one for my daughter for quite a while.
A few years ago I bought two bags of polystyrene “beans” to make a bed for our dog Aron. The bed was duly made, filled and rejected. So, out came the polystyrene and in went the hollowfibre filling. Hey, presto! Aron has loved his bed ever since. The polystyrene beads ended up in the attic before being moved to the garage when we moved house. Master has been asking me periodically to get rid of them but I knew they would come in handy one day (I admit I am a bit of a hoarder).
Well, the day has come. After trawling the internet for patterns I settled on this one from a German website. I made the pattern for the medium sized bag as Little Miss Bossy-Boots is only two and a half and I didn’t want her to disappear into the depths of the bean bag forever.
I cut out the pattern from an old duvet cover and started sewing. When it was time to insert the hexagons I realised that I had done a bit of mis-measuring when drawing the pattern. My solution was to cut out circles for the top and bottom instead. The bean bag was very quick to sew; the filling, however, was a completely different story. Little Miss Bossy-Boots insisted on helping: let me just say that our living room floor was completely covered in styrofoam balls. I tried to use a dustpan and brush to pick them up but that was a bad idea. They took on a life of their own and jumped out of the dustpan all by themselves. In the end I had to pick them up by hand….
I got there in the end, though, and all that was left was to choose the fabric for a cover. I promised Little Miss Bossy-Boots that she was allowed to choose any fabric she wanted. I so regret those words now. You’ll see why very soon.