How to Fill a Bean Bag Chair or Floor Puff for FREE!

Subtitle:  How to drive your husband crazy

If you saw my stashbusting tutorial for floor puffs, or cushions (my kids named them floor puffs), you may remember this picture:

My family room covered in 12 yards of patchwork goodness!!!  Well, here is the final result of all that:

Stacked up or spread out over the basement floor:

I did have two large bean bag chairs to reuse filling from, but we still needed more to fill them all nicely.  I've been asked where to get bean bag filling....  A quick swagseach resulted that it is easy to order it online, but spending money on Styrofoam pellets isn't in my budget.  Here are my solutions (and lessons learned from them):

1. Break up Styrofoam packaging:  We've all gotten something that came with molded Styrofoam to protect it.  This just ends up in a landfill since at least around here, it isn't recyclable.  If your husband can't put up with the mess it causes for a few days, wait until he is out of town!!!  Breaking this stuff up is pretty easy, but makes a real mess and is time consuming if you are trying to fill as many as I did!  The kids and I broke it down as small as we possibly could but the little scraps fly all over the house.  I'm still finding it in rooms we weren't even in.  But after a few vacuuminga most of it can easily be caught.
2. Old soft stuff:  This is a bit of a miscellaneous category.  I collected quite a bit of serger trimmings and sweater scraps that were too small to do anything else with.  I also found an old pillow that had seen better days and used the stuffing from that.  The other old thing I found was a few pillows I'd crocheted years ago out of really soft yarn.  They had gotten pretty matted down and weren't being used.  I simply started sipping it into small pieces and added some of this to each puff.
3. Packing Peanuts:  This turned out to be the easiest method.  If I had started with this I would have just done this.  To get enough I suggest asking local friends to save it for you when they get a package since packing stores will charge for it.  Not only was it the easiest Styrofoam to break up, we ended up filling the bag with it whole and then dancing on the puff to break it up.

Ultimately, my 6 puffs have a combo of all three plus the filling from the two old bean bag chairs.  Next time I get packing peanuts I will probably add some to all the bags since I think it is what will smush down the fastest (based on how easy it was to break up).  I'm also going to continue to collect my serger trimmings and keep them out of a land fill.  I love bean bag chairs, the two old ones were mine in high school and I refilled them several times over the years.  It is almost an on going process, but I doubt I will need to break down Styrofoam packaging for a while, until they really need re-filling.  And yes, I'll wait until IronFish is out of town to do that again...

Peace be with you,