Monday, October 15, 2018

Halloween Cornhole Beanbags

Bruce's second grade class is doing a cornhole booth for the school fair. Some other parents made and painted the board, and my husband got some black and orange beanbags. He suggested stenciling something on them to enhance the theme. Challenge accepted!

I decided to try out freezer paper stencils. Since the beanbags wouldn't be possible to keep flat while painting that seemed like an easier way to go.

I considered doing a different picture on each beanbag but decided to make it a little easier. After a little discussion with the spouse, I decided to go for skulls on the black ones and bats on the orange ones. I used this skull and this bat.

Once I had the freezer paper and fabric paint on hand, it was just a matter of finding the right moment when I could try to paint eight beanbags without having too many little fingers nearby. Fortunately James actually took a nap on a weekend, so I struck!

First step was to print out eight copies of each image (since I wanted to paint both sides of each beanbag) on the freezer paper, then cut out the shapes. It took me probably 20 sheets of freezer paper to get this right, because I kept putting them in the printer upside down! You wouldn't think I'd be able to make that same mistake so many times...but you'd be wrong.

Then, I got to use my little craft iron for the first time to stick the paper on. Had some trouble keeping it hot enough, though. It seemed like it would cool off after a few minutes of operating, and I had to turn it off and back on to get it back to maximum.
Next was paint! I used a metallic black for the bats. Two of the skulls were in flat white, and two in metallic white. I had to do two coats for the skulls to get it nice and light over the black fabric.
Here they all are drying off! Once they were dried, it was time to flip 'em and repeat for the other side. And then, I got to peel off all the stencils.
I also added little red dots for the bats' eyes. And ta-da! Complete!
Not perfect, but I'm pretty pleased considering it's the first time I've tried that particular technique. 

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