Easter Chicken Bean Bag Tutorial

Cute Stitched Easter Chicks to Juggle or Chuck!

How do you fancy making some chickens for your Easter Sport's Day?

 Be careful though, they seem to breed quickly!

A friend's Mum needed some chicken bean-bags for an Easter Activity Day she runs at her local church.  Now when I say 'needed' she actually just requested square bags, but these quilted chickens are much more fun for the little ones!  If you want to make your own, just follow the step by step instructions below.

Pyramid Beanbag Tutorial

Supplies

Fabric, wadding (batting), scraps of red and yellow felt, small black buttons, dried rice or beans

Firstly mark out your rectangles onto your choice of fabric.  I made mine 12 cm by 18 cm.

As you can see in the picture, I decided to quilt my rectangles so that my finished chickens would hold their shape better.  If you prefer a quicker option, just iron some heavyweight interfacing onto the reverse of your fabric.

The next step is to attach the eyes, beak, comb and wattle.  The eyes are two small black buttons and the other features are simple shapes cut out of scraps of yellow and red felt.  One eye is hidden behind the felt pieces in the pictures.

I placed the parts by eye rather than measuring, this makes each chicken just that little bit different!

One little point to watch out for is not to catch the comb in your right hand seam when you sew the chicken up. I pinned mine out of the way to avoid the risk of this happening.  You can see what I mean more clearly in the picture below;

Once you have stitched on the eyes and are happy with the placement of your felt pieces simply fold your rectangle in half and sew along the top and right hand side.  Then turn out and use a blunt object to push out the corners.  You should now have something that looks like this;

Now here comes the clever bit.  We are going to stitch up the last seam so that the chicken becomes a lovely pyramid shape.  This 3-D shape is achieved by matching the top seam to the middle of the bottom of the chicken.  This sounds a little complicated but is very easy.  A picture speaks a thousand words so hopefully this will make it clear;

You can either then either machine stitch this seam or hand sew it.  If you are using a machine, don't forget to  leave a gap so that you can add the dried rice or beans!   

I used a machine, added the rice and then just had a small opening to slip-stitch closed.

All done!