Stuffed animal overload

Liza never plays with her stuffed animals, but since most consignment stores won't take them - and most of them were gifts, anyway - we're accumulating quite a morass of stuffed stuff underfoot. There's a really useful way to corral them and use them as a chair, but the $60 price tag was a bit high for something that was going to be used to store something we don't use, anyway. But Liza has been lusting after her friend's bean bag chair, so I thought we'd try a little self-help.

Found a free pattern online, found enough fabric in my stash and another one of my mother's free zippers, carved out enough time to sew by parking the kid in front of a seemingly endless stream of the same two Blue's Clues episodes over and over again. This morning, it was done.

You can tell she hates it. It's a traditional bean bag chair, only instead of tiny little styrene balls, it's stuffed with that giant dog I knit for her and some polar bears and Blue and whatever else we had laying around.

It would be cooler if we had the clear windows to help locate the contents, but since she never actually uses the contents, who gives a flying fig where any particular animal is located inside? As long as it's not poking you anywhere when you sit on it, one place is as good as another, I suppose.

If you're not crafty and don't have the fabric laying around, it would probably be easiest and cheapest to just go buy a vinyl one at Wal-Mart and throw out the liner that has the beads in it (or stick that part in the attic to use once the stuffed toys are outgrown or smashed flat).