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;
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.
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