The Girls of Gallifrey: Caution... Girls with paint brushes!

Painting your new cornhole boards

This is where the project gets fun, well, as long as you don't decide to paint the chevron pattern. Don't get us wrong, we love the chevron pattern and think it looks super cool! But it involved way to much math for our mushy summer brains.

These are the painting products we used to paint our cornhole boards:

semi-gloss latex paint with primer – 1 quart of each color (some people use high-gloss)
painter’s tape
Paint rollers
Paint brushes
Paint tray
Plastic tarp or cloth to paint on
Sidewalk chalk or a pencil (if you decide to attempt the Chevron)

Kim showed Carly an easy trick by placing a plastic bag around the paint tray so we could reuse the tray without having to wash it out out. Nice one Kim! We were going for a summer coastal theme so we picked out three colors, cream, coral, and teal.

First we painted our base coat with a roller. We went with cream for the base coat and needed to do two coats to cover up the wood. We didn't put the paint on thickly and we live in a dry climate in the summer so the paint dried fairly fast. As you know, watching paint dry can be a bit boring, that is where the beer comes in! We painted the entire board including the edges in cream. Don't forget to paint the inside edge of the circle as well.

Painting the base coat

If you want to keep things simple, you can keep the edges cream (or your choice color of base coat) we would highly suggest taping the around the edges once the base coat is dry, so that way your paint doesn't drip down when painting your design.

Remember in the last post when we said we were overly ambitious? That is where painting the chevron comes in! Again, don't get us wrong, it looks super cool and we looked up a couple of different ways to do the chevron pattern on Google. We decided to use a coordinate grid method. We divided the board into four sections across and four down using sidewalk chalk. Then we used painters tape to create the mountain peaks for the pattern. We also chose to paint alternating the 3 colors (the cream of course was the part under the tape). We will however let you do the rest of the math if you choose to use the chevron pattern. As you can see, we only have one cornhole board with a chevron pattern, we found it extremely frustrating.

Creating the coordinate grid (note the highly needed beer in the background)

The chevron taped off

The painted chevron

For the other boards we went with a much easier design, horizontal and vertical stripes. We didn't want them to be traditional so our stripe sizes varies. We went for a beach towel look alternating the stripe widths and colors.

Vertical stripes

Horizontal stripes

We kept this simple by placing the painters tape on the edge of the board where we wanted the stripe and just brought it straight down or to the side.

We painted the stripes in with a brush. We had to use two coats for our stripes to cover up all the base coats.

After the paint dried, it was fun to peal back the tape and see our final result! We think they turned out well!

Pealing off the tape (note the chevron edge- pretty huh? Nope! Use tape on the edges to keep them clean)

The final result!

The final step to complete the cornhole game was sewing the bean bags. This was probably the easiest part of the whole process! Okay, not probably the easiest part, it was the easiest part. And this time I made Carly use the sewing machine after all, I had used all the power tools! We aren't going to go into details on how to use your sewing machine, so hopefully you know how.

Here are the supplies:

Supplies

5/8 yard of 2 colors of fabric (Duck Cloth or VERY sturdy outdoor fabric*) this makes 16 bean bags (8 of each color)
Sewing machine
Coordinating thread
Rotary cutter or scissors
Ruler
Pins
Funnel of paper rolled into a funnel
2 cup measuring cup
Tub to catch raining popcorn kernels
Popcorn kernels (4- 64oz bags for 16 bean bags) (but officially you should use Feed Grade Dry Corn)

*The first orange fabric we used wasn't quite a thick as the teal and started to come apart when we first played. We had to purchase new orange and start again.

Start by cutting 7x7" squares of fabric, you will need 16 squares of each color (for the 2 cornhole sets). Place right sides of fabric together and pin around the square leaving a 1 1/2" opening.

7x7" Square

Be sure to use the correct foot for zig-zag stitch and set your machine to a zig-zag stitch. Sew around the square using a 1/4" seam allowance leaving the 1 1/2" opening to turn and pour the popcorn into. Be sure to back-stitch at the start and end of your stitches!

Look! Carly is sewing!

Trim the corners slightly and turn right side out using your fingers to carefully push out the edges.

Turned out bean bag

Measure 2 cups of popcorn and using your funnel, fill you bag. One 64oz bag of popcorn kernels should fill 4 bean bags. Turn the edges of the hole under and pin. We also used a pin to hold the corn back from the machine as we stitched. Stitch the hole shut (still using zig-zag stitch) making sure to back-stitch to ensure your bean bag is securely closed.