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If you are one of the brave souls even willing to consider sewing your own high performance, built-to-spec Bean Bag Toss, chances are that you already know your way around the business end of the sewing machine. If so, this ought to be a snap. If not, no worries, just find someone you know that is pretty good at sewing and convince them to do it for you.
To prevent mass confusion you will want to have two different colors of fabric in order to keep teams’ progress straight. Whatever your color scheme of choice, try to pick out sturdy looking duck cloth that is as blemish-free as possible. Since the fabric is pretty cheap, I purchased it with a couple extra inches of fabric so that I could square the cuts up at home for myself. Having been trimmed satisfactorily by either you or the fabric counter, your hunk of duck cloth will probably be a long strip 7” wide by 56” long. Now all you need to do is make the squares for each bag by cutting every 7 inches. Using the right tools can make things much more accurate and often more convenient. The rolling blade, a gridded cutting mat and a plastic cutting guide really make all this trimming simple, but if you don’t have any of these, a good ruler, a pencil, and some sharp scissors will do the trick. Now do the same with the other color.
At this point, there should be eight squares of duck cloth, 7 inches by 7 inches, in each color, just sitting there on your workspace, practically begging to be sewn up into four bags and stuffed with feed corn. This is where the fun begins. Place two squares of the same color together so that their edges line up exactly; since the fabric is identical on both sides, it shouldn’t matter which side is up. Each seam should be 1/2 inch in from the edge and double stitched. Sew as indicated above for three of the four sides, but be sure to LEAVE ONE SIDE OPEN. You’ll need a hole for getting the corn into the bag. One smart move might also be to trim the corners a little. This will reduce the amount of excess fabric that gets crammed into the corners once we turn the bag inside-out. For additional protection you can also apply fabric glue to the seams before turning bag inside out. There are no guarantees, of course, but a little bit of fabric glue along the inside of those seams might help ease your mind on this subject. It probably can’t hurt in any case, but it’s an optional safety precaution that the risk-acceptant can skip. Finally, turn the bag inside-out. Sharp corners are difficult to achieve given the stiffness of the fabric, but you can improve the look of the corners by pushing on them from the inside with a pencil, pen, etc. You’ll notice that once turned out, the bag is now the regulation 6 inches in width.
Now measure out the corn you’ll need. Each bag should weigh between 14.5 to 16 oz. once filled. As you play, the corn will break up, and your bags will actually lose a bit of weight in the form of dust, so you might want to make it on the heavy end of the acceptable range just to be safe. For this step, you can’t beat a digital baking scale, accurate to 1/8 oz., but if that’s not an option, 2 cups of corn comes pretty close to regulation.
The next steps are the trickiest in the whole process and make take some creativity depending on your sewing machine and how stiff the fabric is. Fold the open ends of the filled bag inward to a depth of 1/2 inch to match the rest of the seams you’ve already sewn. I found that a well-placed sewing pin helped to hold the sides closed, and, in order to keep the folds from slipping once under the needle and for overall strength. I applied some of the fabric glue to the last, soon-to-be-sewn seam. Placing your stitches as close to the edge as possible will give the bags a nice look. Do not forget to double-stitch here, too.
Now that you are done get outside and give them a try.