I’ve been wanting to make bean bags for my daughter. I haven’t had time to work on them, but thought it would be a low stress opportunity to see how doing such a project would work out with her. Here is a step by step in the “how we pulled this off”.
1) She watched while I measured and cut the first two squares (5″). I described what I was doing, as we went to hold her attention.
2) I positioned them in the machine, then put the pressure foot on the table where she could reach.
3) I had her push the pressure foot and told her to stop when I neared the end. She did stop 95% of the time, when asked, which was pretty good for a gal who is not quite 2, but I kept my hand, that wasn’t holding the fabric, nearby, so I could stop her if I needed to.
4) I only sewed three sides. Clipped the corners, and turned right side out.
5) For filling, I found that it was easier if the pouch stayed open, so I put it in a mug and turned the edges over the edge of the mug to hold it in place. She added beans, while I cut the next 3 bags. Once she filled the pouch, I folded in the top 1/4″ all around the opening, and top stitched it closed. It’s not as “professional” looking that way, but hand sewing would have slowed this WAAAAYYYY down, and we needed to hold attention, so we went fast and easy. One down, 3 to go.
6) We stitched, filled and closed the next 2 together. By the third one she was dropping beans on the floor for fun, and on the 4th she was more interested in putting beans from the table back in the bucket, so I quickly finished. It worked out perfectly that we were both ready to move on by number 4, and I don’t think we should have stopped at 3, so all was good.
We then got a basket and took turns tossing them in. That lasted about 10 minutes, then we went for a walk to my mom and dad’s to show them what we had made.
Here she is gathering them.
She wanted to eat the beans and I wouldn’t let her, but she found a way to get them in her mouth that was acceptable to me.
This was not the tutorial I mentioned yesterday, but I did not have time to night to work on my projects. So it will have to wait for another day.
[...] the sewing tomorrow. She likes to help and I worked out a way for her to help run the machine (remember the bean bag post?). We’ll see how the day [...]