Totoro

Well somehow we got it in our collective heads at our house that we needed a giant bean bag chair.  But not just any giant bean bag chair.  A giant Totoro bean bag chair.  This seemed crazily unfeasible (bean bag filling is expensive!) until I found 3 large used (i.e., gross, nasty, covered in who knows what) bean bags for free on Freecycle.  Well that's the filling then, isn't it?

In searching the internet for examples of a giant Totoro bean bag chair, I came up with almost nothing.  But designing a giant Totoro myself seemed crazy.  And then I happened upon this guy, who made himself one, only his is a giant pillow (stuffed with pillow stuffing, not bean bag chair beans).  And he sells the pattern!  Now, the "pattern" is only a one-sheet PDF with all the pertinent Totoro parts measured in inches.  I will take it!  This saved me hours of work.  In fact if I hadn't had a pattern, I might not have tried it.  If you want to see his pattern, you can give him a dollar and he'll e-mail it to you. 

$50 worth of fabric later, and I was sewing.  I modified his pattern somewhat.  Gave Totoro a big smile instead of a tiny mouth, sewed his whiskers flat on his face, left off his tail, and put his arms at his sides.  I also had to go crazy on the bottom.  I needed to put in two layers of zippers since we were going to fill it with extremely messy styrofoam beans.  And I managed to do it!  I'm pretty proud of myself, actually.  I got skills.

[Cutting out the body]

["Consummate v's! Consummate!"]

[Parts and pattern]

[More parts]

[Laying him out to pin] 

 

[My sewing machine chugged right through this genuine leather like it was butter, but less messy. Old school Berninas, y'all. Seriously.]

[I finished sewing him and Norman decided he had to wear him. Creeptastic!]

[After Norman put in about 2/3 of the stuffing. Comfy, but not quite right.]

[Then I obtained another giant bean bag, and... Full!]

[Such a happy sort]

 

[And we've decided he's best right here.  Lucy can jump onto him without running into anything hard or pointy, and we can lounge on him and watch TV!]

Oh my goodness -- he is so comfortable.  You mush in and it all just molds around you.  Aaaahhh....

All told I spent about $75 on materials (including buying two used bean bags for their filling), and I-don't-even-want-to-know number of hours of work, not to mention the time Norman spent taking the filling out of the bean bags and putting it in Totoro.  This is certainly the biggest and craziest project I've ever undertaken.  I'm quite proud.  And comfy.

PS - If you come visit us, you are welcome to use Totoro as your guest bed. He is totally big and comfortable enough. But then you might not want to leave.