Update : Beanbag

The Bean bag is nearly complete! Here it is filled and the denim skin added. Its apparently quite comfortable, and has become the favorite choice for sitting in the house. I'm glad that it turned out like it did. I"m even glad I had to back up and redo it, as the original plan would have been much too big.

The bag in entirety weighs about 60 lbs, so its easily moved around when it needs to be. The only thing missing at this point is to add velcro to the open flap on the bottom, and that's it. The velcro I bought is too small and there isn't enough to do what I need, so I'll need another trip to a fabric store.

To be honest, i'm glad this went as well as it did. after the failue of the last project (the laptop bag), I needed a win to keep up my motivation.

 

Jenn playing some DS game. 

Update : Beanbag

Here's pictures of the foam being unloaded into the inner lining of the beanbag. I used a super-cheap sheet set for the fabric.

Laptop Bag Project = Failed

So the fasteners never went on the laptop bag. The bag was ultimately a failure, for one reason ; the laptop doesn't fit in the bag. It's too big by a half inch, or rather the bag is too small by about a half an inch.

To tell the truth, it's an ironic end, as I worried through the whole process that I was adding too much seam allowance, adding too many bag patches together, generally making the project too BIG for the bag to be properly protected.

Well, failures are inevitable. and on reflection, if any of my current projects were to fail, I would rather this one than any of the others. That doesn't mean that this bag failing precludes my other projects from failing as well, but it's best to remain as optimistic as possible.

The bag isn't an entire failure. The fabric is salvagable with work, and I would hate to cut up one of Jennifer's favorite sweaters to just end up tossing the scraps in the garbage.

Laptop bag Ver. 2 will commence shortly. Right now though I'm going to focus on making progress on the bean bag. with effort and a quick trip to the store, I think I can complete it this weekend.

Laptop Bag

 

As you can see the plastic and fabric sides have been sewn together, leaving one side open. This was a lot more difficult than I had planned for, as the plastic isn't stretchy at all, and the knit stretches under its own weight. this led to constant headaches keeping the 2 sides together, as I couldn't pin them together. Making any more holes than absolutely necessary in the plastic would weaken it. I went back to the video and looked for ideas. Of course I missed the part about the bobby pins standing in for sewing pins.

Needless to say, that made things go a lot more smoothly.

After sewing the sides, I turned the whole thing right side out ;

 

Notice I kept the pockets, thought they would be a cool addition.

Stuffing the bag was easier than harder than I thought. Adding the stuffing to the bag and sewing every few inches to keep it  stable was easy, and took less foam than I anticipated. The hard part was the foam. Shipped vacuum-sealed, the foam started expanding immediately after I opened it and spilling everywhere. I tried my best to limit the damage, but now there's a liberal scattering of little foam pieces all over the floor of my workspace.

The inside padding.

I sewed the sides together, checking after one side that the laptop would fit (yes it would) I sewed the remaining side, finally forming a recognizable bag.

Bag.

I hemmed the sides of the flap and I'm almost done. just add a fastener to the flap to close and that's it.

"Recycled" plastic laptop bag.

Update : Beanbag

So about six months ago I decided that instead of paying the $400+ for a Lovesac, I was going to make one.

While contemplating the idea, I decided to add to the project by attempting to make this lovesac as cheaply as possible.  I was going to build it out of discarded supplies. It was going to be an art piece about the ammount of waste a city throws out and how used fabric and textiles can easily be repurposed.

That project failed. After spending 2 months collecting free clothing from craigslist and local shops going out of business, I had a mountain of cloth. I planned on building the bag out of a sturdy material, make a second "skin" on the outside that could be removed and washed, and fill it with shredded clothing.  Another month shredding discarded clothes (after washing them), It quickly became apparent that this was not a great idea. The pile of shredded clothes was very heavy, even my my standards (no one who saw it except me could even move the pile). Even when split up into more manageable bags, the shredded clothing wasn't very comfortable. It was hard, and lumpy, and mo amount of shredding into finer and smaller pieces resolved that. I put that part on hold while I contemplated the next step. The skin.

During the 2 months of collecting, I had decided that I wanted the skin to be in denim. I put all the jeans and denim jackets I found aside for this purpose ( I also left out all the soft cotton shirts for another related project). There wasn't enough. So I relented and did the next best thing; I bought a pile of "plus-sized" jeans from a local thrift store. Approximately 16 pairs cost me about $20. I proceeded then to rope Jenn into helping me remove the seams on all of them.  I started sewing. 2pairs sewn together became 4 pairs, then 6, then 8. Soon I had nearly 14 pairs of jeans sewn into a giant banner.  I planned on sewing a 8-foot tube, then add domes to the top and bottom.

After adding the first dome, I ran out of steam. I was almost done with the skin, but I had nothing to fill it with. I became unmotivated and overwhelmed by the gigantic mass of denim in my living room. I let it sit while I contemplated my next move.

Weeks passed, then a month. I moved into a house, and the denim went into storage while the shredded cloth went into the trash (I know, shame on me). spring and summer came and went. The denim stayed in a duffel in the storage shed.

When I decided that I needed to start this blog, and the projects that it accompanied, I remembered the beanbag idea I had. If I was going to reboot by self-motivation by starting these, I needed to face the Ghost of Abandoned Projects Past.  I pulled out the duffel and took a long look at it.

If it was filled, it would be an 8ft sphere.

While working my way through the projects on Threadbanger loooking for more details on the laptop bag idea, I came across their beanbag project;

College Dorm Beanbag

It had the pattern I should have used; a baseball. it was perfect. I would re-make my beanbag using that pattern.

While looking up possible fillers for the bean bag, I decided to look up what Lovesac uses, since that's who i'm trying to emulate to begin with. They use a shredded mattress pad type foam that collapses  for ease of shipping, but holds up well once allowed to fully inflate.

I found suppliers for both this foam and shredded memory foam. Memory foam is denser, thus a lot heavier, thus a lot more expensive. I opted for a 80% poly foam 20% memory foam solution. I calculated the volume of multiple sizes of spheres and how much it would cost to fill each with this mix of foam.  A 4' sphere would cost about $80 in foam, not counting shipping. Each 1 foot increase in size brought a doubling in volume, and price as well, as a 5' bag would cost $175 to fill, and around $295 for a 6 foot bag.  I stopped there, not even wanting to know how much my original 8 foot bag would have cost to fill. at almost $300 just for the filler on a 6 foot bag, I might as well just buy a lovesac.

So after consulting Jenn and Richard, I went with the 4 foot option. Its cheapest, and more likely to find room in the living room. Now I needed to modify my 8 foot capped cylinder into a 4-foot baseball shape.

I found that the proportion of the baseball (or peanut) pattern is about 3/4 the diameter of the bag. by this I mean that the diameter of the widest point of the pattern (across the bulbous ends) is 3/4 the width of the entore bag once inflated. This made things vary easy. Since I wanted a 4 foot bag, the widest part of the pattern needed to be 3 feet across.

 

I couldn't get the full pattern to fit on the fabric a it was, so I had to improvise. I would cut out 4 copies of half of the pattern and sew them together in the middle. It worked out rather well. Here's pictures of the process.

 

This is actually 1/4 the pattern, still pretty big.

I traced the pattern on one half,

Then flipped it over to finish.

After cutting the excess away this is what I was left with.

Next, I will sew the halves together, sew up the inner cover, and fill it. Not far left to go on this one.