Name Bean Bags

You might remember my thoughts to make several handmade gifts for my family.  Well, it was just a thought...not reality.  I still like the idea of trying to make fabric letters for my kids, but I after cutting out one letter's layers, I thought it was just too much.

Since I still wanted to sew a toy that had letters, I made bean bags for my children.  Each bean bag has a letter of the child's name.

These are rustic.  I know.  But they have great potential for throwing and word building.

You can create words other than their names, too.

VEGAN-for my friend Jenny

Silly Eagle Books first gave me the idea for name bean bags.  But she used fabric paint...and I did not want to buy fabric paint or freezer paper.  I had the thought to just use a fabric marker, but really I tried, and it didn't look good.  So I used applique.  I learned how to do it when I made the name pillows.

I have always had a thing for lettering.  I cut these letters fully free-hand.  (When I was in high school I used to draw the names of my favorite bands on my book covers and notebooks to look like their names on my cassette tapes.  I was pretty good, too, at Poison and Cinderella.  Though my taste in music has changed, and I pay much more attention to lyrics than I did then, I still like to play with letters and words.)

If you are interested in cutting letters from fabric or paper free-hand, I totally recommend it!  To keep the letters all the same height, I first cut a long rectangle of fabric.  Then I cut that rectangle into smaller rectangles, always keeping the height the same.  It is not necessary to have all the rectangles the same width because some letters should naturally be wider than others.  (W takes up much more width than I.)  Then I just cut.  Of course you could draw the letters on the fabric, too, but this worked great for this project.

I appliqued the letters to the top of the fabric squares and then sewed them, leaving a small opening for the beans.   (A funnel is helpful!!)  We learned that Roman beans are much too large, dense, and heavy to be in a bean bag.  It would have been a weapon for my children!  We changed to a smaller black-eyed bean.  They turned out well enough for our family.

If you decide to make name bean bags, I'd love to see your result!  Paint sure would have been simpler, but these work, too.  I didn't have any masculine small-print fabric, so I used the navy stripes.  I really liked the feminine purple with multi for my daughter though.