What the world needs now is . . . cow beanbags (?)

 What the world needs now . . . is . . . 

. . . cow beanbags, and lots of them.

But don't worry, I'm on it! I've got this taken care of.

I didn't know until recently that this was what the world needs; I guess I could say I stumbled into the discovery by accident.  I'd made a "Little Farm Library" for my front porch, with directions to passers by that they could "Take a Cow, Leave a Cow".  Having been by many Little Free Libraries that say the same thing with books, I figured this would be cute for people to check out.

I also figured that, like with the book version, that the turnover in contents would be minimal.  Well, I was right on the "cute" and wrong about the turnover.  My porch has become a bit of a tourist destination; people stop by and take pictures; they bring their friends; I wake up and hear people outside my window chatting about it: "did you get a photo?  Oh, I want to take a cow, but I don't want to take the last one!"

There's been a lot of cow taking.  Sometimes there's also cow leaving, or even other animal leaving (I came home one day to find a rubber ducky sitting by itself in the barn).  But mostly, it's cow taking.  

So I decided that I need to come up with a large supply of give-able cows.  Quick trips to yard sales and to so-called-thrift stores yielded basically nothing, which is kind of surprising because my city is surrounded by farm land, so you'd think cow-kitsch would be everywhere.  But no, apparently, I have the corner on cow kitsch (or perhaps, more correctly, the "porch" on cow kitsch).  

I of course wanted to avoid bringing more plastic into the world, so ordering happy-meal-style cows was out of the question.  I dabbled with the idea of getting cow erasers, but that turned out to be a trickier quest than I thought, and also probably more expensive and plastic-laden than I wanted.

So, eventually, I stopped at the fabric store and bought two yards of flannel in a cow print, for the grand sum of $7.  With that, I knew I was in business.

Two yards of cows, on one dining room table.

Fortunately, the cows alternate directions on this particular piece of fabric, so as I cut them out and placed the fabric good-side-to-good-side, I could get them going the same direction (that is, head-to-head and bum-to-bum).

Adorable rainbow cow teams up with contemplative cow.

Sewing around the cow, leaving a hole at the bottom.

With all my work in the past making t-shirt bags and other such bags, I realized that if I made little gussets, then the cow bags could stand up on their feet, rather than being like pillows.  So I sewed triangle gussets on each side of the base.

It's hard to see what's going on --
basically, I opened up the corner and placed seam-to-seam,
and then sewed a line perpendicular to the seam to make a triangle. 

This shows the gussets maybe a little better. 

I then turned the cows right-side-out, and used a funnel to help fill the little bags with lentils, because apparently when I bought a half-gallon of lentils a few months ago thinking I'd start eating them, I was overly optimistic.

Lentils through the funnel into the cow.

Then I sewed up the hole in the bottom, and Voila! Cow bean bags that stand up.

The start of a bean-bag herd of cows.  

The bean bags (like the whole display, really) has been very popular.  On Saturday night and Sunday morning, I initially made 14 bean bags.  By Thursday, I'd already had 10 of them sent into the barn and then rehomed.  

Making a new cow bean bag takes me, I'm guessing, about 5 minutes.  It's a nice contemplative thing to do as I'm getting ready for bed, so I think I'll be able to keep the supply up with demand.  What fun!