The Bean Chair

I've been wanting to have a bean bag chair for my son for awhile. I've seen really cute homemade ones before, and I always see people selling old ones on craigslist, so I figured I could find a cheap used one and make a new cover for it.

Unfortunately it seems that the moment I set out to find something, they because impossible to get. Either everyone ran out of used bean bag chairs, or they were always super far away. So instead I decided to scrounge up some supplies I already had and see what I could put together. (Note: old pillows work ok for stuffing when you have to, but they are hard to re-fluff as the chair gets used and loses it's shape)

1 Simplicity 5105 Pattern + 15 or so old pillows + cute & affordable upholstery fabric
= awesome DIY bean bag chair

It all was going great until the cute fabric part. I couldn't find anything the I liked in my price range for the life of me. It was fine at first because I had some spare cotton fabric that I wanted to use to sew a bladder to hold all the stuffing anyways.  I figured that a little later on I could sew a removable cover from the nice fabric which I could wash whenever it got dirty.

Here's the half-filled bean chair with one of the pillows I used:

As you can see the spare fabric I had isn't exactly boyish, or really cute at all.

I finished stuffing and sewing up the inside, but that's where all progress stopped for a few months. I just couldn't bring my self to spend very much on the outer fabric since this was turning out to be such a hodgepodge project. 

Fortunately my son was so excited about the prospect of something new to jump on that he didn't seem to notice the bean chair was completely covered in pink and purple flower print.  Phew!

Last week though I happened to stop by one of my favorite home decor fabric stores and they had recently marked down a bunch of their fabrics to $2/yd! They had this blue giraffe print cotton canvas which would be perfect! The bean chair finally done, and now I don't have to be embarrassed and shove it into the back room whenever we have people over into our living room!

Now it's the new favorite place to relax and play Mario.

Altogether this project cost me about $7 (The pattern was only $1, and $6 for the fabric). I'm pretty pleased since smaller ones I considered originally at Target go for about $25 and I like the print on this much better. I'm still going to keep my eye our for a cheap used one, just so I can get proper bean bag filling, but I'm surprised how well that the old pillow stuffing is working.

**Note: never use packing peanuts for stuffing. They rub against each other when you sit on it and make a sound just as irritating as nails on a blackboard. I originally made this mistake thinking it would add a little more bulk, and then had to go back and spend about half an hour picking out the peanuts from the fluff. Also they squish completely flat after a few sits.