DIY Bean Bag Chair

Last week I found a tutorial on how to make a kid's bean bag chair on Pinterest, which you can find by clicking here. It looked like a super easy and quick project to make--and it was!

I bought some cute fabric at JoAnn's that was in clearance for $4 a yard. I bought 1 5/8 yards--which was just enough with a tiny bit extra to make this (I used regular quilting weight cotton, which was 43" wide. If you use home dec fabric, like the tutorial suggests, you won't need as much yardage since it's wider).

I also found the bean bag filling at JoAnn's, which came in a giant bag full of small foam balls. This stuff isn't cheap, I discovered, and I needed two bags (one bag was 2 cubic feet and the chair requires 3.5). Thankfully I had coupons, otherwise I wouldn't have made this project since the cost for the bean bag filling would have been quite a bit more than just buying a finished bean bag chair somewhere.

I also only used a 12" zipper instead of a 22" since that was all I had on hand and I forgot to buy one at the store. This was fine, other than making filling the bag a bit of a challenge. A messy challenge.

Behold.

Filling the chair is the most difficult part of this project, and really it isn't that bad--it took about 10 minutes to get the chair full. In total, this was a 30 minute project--seriously. I made it while Elise was napping and Charlotte was eating lunch. Those are my favorite kinds of projects!

Charlotte has quickly become a huge fan of her new bean bag chair. Since it's filled with foam balls it's super light, so she carries it from room to room as she pleases. It has also been outside and used as a landing pad off the deck--which I vetoed after several dozen jumps, fearing that the seams would just burst apart and I'd have to refill the thing completely. So now the rule is that the bean bag chair must remain indoors and not get jumped on from a height greater than two feet. Sigh.

I tried it out myself as well--and it really is quite comfy!

Happy Sewing.

~Stacy