Right now in my life, a tripod isn't exactly in the budget. I want to be able to be in some pictures with my kids instead of always being behind the camera, so I came up with this DIY bean bag tripod. It adds height and great stability for my camera; now I don't have to worry about my camera sliding off of  stacked books. It has a way of just molding around my camera so I feel like I can walk away from it and things will be okay. Awesome! You could even rest it on top of your car if you want some outdoor pictures. This size of bag works really well for my Canon Rebel T3i. Here's what you need to make this...


Cut 2 8" circles. The pink string is 8.5" folded in half and tied, equaling 4". Once you draw a line all the way around the center pencil, you have an 8" circle.

Cut a strip of fabric 8"x 24". If you don't want your beanbag to be about 8" high,  you can always minus a few inches from the height. For those who care about the math, you get the circumference of the circle by multiplying 8 by 3.14. You actually get 25.12, but that turned out to be too much fabric. For some reason unknown to me, 24" works rather than 25" and still gives enough room for SA.

Pin the base to the long side of the "side strip" right sides together. You will need to leave room for your SA for the side of the bag as you can see on the right hand side of this picture. Pin the side of the bag together.

Begin sewing the side of the bag together until you reach where the circle base meets the side piece. Then sew around the base of the beanbag attaching the circle piece to the side piece. It should look like these two pictures...


Pin the top circle to the other end of the beanbag but leave a few inches open.

Sew it and then pull the bag through the hole so it's right side out.

Fill it with rice or beans. Trust me, it takes a lot of rice to fill this bag up. I didn't actually count how many cups of rice I poured into this, but it was definitely more than 10 cups. I didn't pack it completely full because I wanted the bag to mold around my camera a little bit.

Fold in the raw edges and pin closed.


Hand stitch the bag closed.

All done!