I saw these adorable bean bags on Pinterest a while back and pinned them to my "Gift Ideas" board, all the while having my two nieces in mind.  They are 2 1/2 and 4 1/2 years old, so I thought these would be perfect for them! 


The original blogger at The Crafty Cupboard who posted the bean bag project has a great tutorial on how she made them, and I pretty much did the same.  I bought 6 fat quarters in different fabrics, then cut them with a rotary cutter into 5-inch squares.  (The fat quarters were less than $3 each.) Then I cut the letter stencils out of freezer paper with my Cricut and painted them on the squares- upper and lower case!  Then I sewed them all together, ironed them out, and filled them with beans.  I got a huge bag of pinto beans at Sam's Club for less than $9.  I still have a few beans left over.  I top-stitched to make them look more finished and, voila!  Hours of fun and learning!



This was a super fun project, and definitely helped me brush up on my sewing skills.  Simple, straight lines, but lots of practice!  There were a lot of steps involved, and I had to do everything 56 times (each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, upper and lower case, plus two extra letters so my nieces could each learn to spell their names with the bean bags = 56 letters), but like I said, all simple stuff.  All in all, I estimate this took about a week's worth of nap times, which is roughly 10-14 hours.  I didn't really keep track.  A great, fun project that will hopefully make for hours of fun and learning for the girls!