Soft and Silly Rice Bags

“Boys will be boys and girls will be boys . . .

so give them something safe to throw.”

-Grandma-

journal entry:

How far back in time do we have to go to find the invention of bean bags?  I guess you had to live in a time when you didn’t need every bean for your dinner and you could find something to sew the beans into that wasn’t needed for clothes.  I suppose you could put anything you could find into a bag or piece of cloth . . . sew it up and have a toy for children to play with.  I remember bean bags from my childhood.  They were always made from scraps . I admit that I am a little more spoiled than my grandmother and her grandmother.  I made these bags for Christmas out of flannel and chenille.  I wanted them to be SOFT when they hit something in the house or another child in the head.  So, these bags are filled with rice.  Rice feels better when it hits you than beans.  What is the point of a bean/rice bag if you can’t throw it?  Each bag is 6×6.  I sewed them right sides together except for a little opening of about 2 inches.  I filled the bags with rice and closed the openings on the sewing machine.  I tied them in groups of three with a bright ribbon and a personalized tag. By the time everyone had their bean/rice bags I had to figure out a game.  So, I brought the red summer buckets inside and spaced them about 8 feet apart (or moved them to two feet for really little people).  Then the throwing began.  Teams got points for the number of bags they could throw into the bucket.  The bucket part saved a lot of heads from being hit and lamps from falling off of the tables. When the juggling began, I knew it was time to make smaller rice bags, which I did.  3×3 rice bags are just perfect for juggling.

“If at first an idea is not absurd,

there’s no hope for it.”

-Albert Einstein-