As well as making toys for the new baby, I’ve also been focusing on making toys for my daughter. I’ve had a go at home made paints and play dough and now I thought I would have a go at these counting bean bags from Chez Beeper Bebe.
This is another lovely easy tutorial. In fact the hardest bit I found was filling up the bean bags with little beans! For materials I used a variety of Cloud 9 Organic fabric. The front of each bean bag is made from Cloud 9′s Forest Friends Flannel in Cloud. Then the back and number are made from (all Cloud 9 Fabric): Speckle-Sun (0); Sand Dollar (1); Blue Yonder (2); Flock (3); Anemone (4); Urchin (5); Crumbs- Earth (6); Toadstalls (7); Speckle-Grass (8); Meadow (9).
I hand appliqued each number using a blanket stitch (tick in the box for new technique learnt!), I didn’t feel up to the fiddliness of using the sewing machine for such little numbers. I used dried haricot beans for the stuffing. I thought I would have a go at making a box to store the bean bags in. Having discovered that they fit very nicely in a plastic tub that we used as temporary storage, I did a few calculations and decided that a 6 inch cube would provide the correct volume of storage needed.
I wanted to have a lid and also an easy way for my two year old to open and shut the lid. So I used some organic cotton ribbon and velcro. The materials used are pretty much the same as last time. I used a second set of the bean bag numbers and attached them to the four sides and lid (leaving the bottom blank).
As I used 10 different fabrics I chose 6 of the fabrics that I had enough left of for the interior. To add a bit of strength to the walls I used a sandwich made of shirt canvas/quilter’s dream green wadding/shirt canvas.
As you can see, the bean bags fit rather nicely into the box.
Lily had spent most of the morning poking at the numbers and counting, whilst I was attempting to finish off the box and seemed pretty happy with the finished result. She was able to open and shut the tab easily.
Her favourite game is currently, tip the bean bags out all over the floor and then put them back into the box and it seems to be standing up to the grabbing and squishing rather nicely.
I will attempt to try and use the bean bags as an educational tool as well at some point!
The method I ended up using to construct the box, didn’t work out entirely successfully, so in the tutorial I have made changes that will hopefully make it a bit easier to construct. At some point I will make another one of these boxes, but in the meantime if you try out the tutorial and have any comments or suggestions please feel free to leave them below!
Download storage box tutorial (coming soon)
As you can see, my daughter has started to get really into dressing up, hence the net skirt on top of her trousers. Up until just before I took these pictures she also had a Yankees baseball cap on, but if fell off whilst she was strangling cuddling the cat. So the next few projects you will probably see for her are going to be making dress up clothes.
