Skip to Content

How To Make Cornhole Bags: DIY Step by Step Guide

We’ve recently gotten into playing cornhole after experiencing the game at a friends cookout. We decided right away that we needed our own cornhole set. After making the boards ourselves, we decided to make the cornhole bags ourselves too.

Making cornhole bags yourself is a simple sewing project that can be done in just a few hours. Cornhole bags weigh approximately 1 pound, measure 6″ by 6″ and are best assembled with the help of a sewing machine.

Here’s the process we used to make our cornhole bags laid out for you step by step so it’s easy to follow along and duplicate exactly what we did. With these steps you will make 8 regulation size and weight cornhole bags.

Table of Contents show

Gather Materials

Traditionally, cornhole bags were made with duck cloth and dried corn kernels. We tried staying as close to traditional and regulation as we could.

We still used duck cloth, but instead of dried corn, we used synthetic corn pieces. It’s basically little pieces of plastic shaped like a kernel of corn. The problem with real corn is that after a while it will start to grow mold inside the bag.

Here’s the full list of materials used in this project:

  • Duck cloth (two colors)
  • Plastic corn pellets
  • Sewing machine
  • Sewing thread
  • Scale
  • Measuring cup (2 cup)

We went with black and red duck cloth, but use any colors you’d like. You will need 4 bags of each color for the teams of a cornhole game. Here’s the Duck Canvas Fabric (link to Amazon) that we used. It comes in a variety of colors to choose from.

As for the filling, some pre-made bags are filled with plastic pellets or shavings. I’ve even heard of people using beans or rice.

If you want a real cornhole bag though, I recommend these Plastic Corn Pellets (link to Amazon) that we used. The pellets are shaped like corn giving you the real traditional cornhole feel.

The sewing machine is optional I suppose, but I wouldn’t want to sew these by hand myself. Try to find a sewing thread that matches the color of the bags so it’s less noticeable.

The scale is also optional, if you’re ok with ballparking it. The bags will be filled with 15.5 ounces of corn pellets, or just under 2 cups worth.

Here’s a video we made covering the entire process, with the steps written out below.

Cut Fabric Squares

You will need to cut 2 squares at 6.5″ by 6.5″ for each bag. The final bag will be 6×6 but you want that extra 1/4″ on each side for sewing them together.

You could also use one rectangle piece 6.5″ tall and 13″ wide per bag, which is what we did. That way you would just fold the fabric rectangle over and you’d have less to sew.

After we measure and cut the first rectangle, we used that as the template to measure and cut all the rest of the rectangles

Warning: Don’t use rectangle 2 as the template for rectangle 3, or rectangle 4 for rectangle 5, and so on. Always use the same rectangle (rectangle 1) for the template.

After you’ve gotten all 8 rectangles cut out, it’s time to sew them up.

Sew Cornhole Bags

Since we used a rectangle instead of two squares per bag. We went ahead and ironed out the folded side on the rectangle so everything lined up nicely for sewing.

We put pins along the edges that needed to be sewn, and then hit it with the sewing machine.

We started by sewing both sides completely, and then the last open third side, we sewed about a quarter of the way in on each end. That way there was a little opening left to flip the bag inside out and fill it from.

Of course, the folded side we didn’t sew at all. Remove the pins after sewing the bags, and then it’s time to flip ’em inside out.

Flip Bags Inside Out

After you’ve got all the bags sewn, it’s time to flip them inside out (or right side in?) so we can fill them. That’s where that little gap in the sewing we left comes into play.

Fill Cornhole Bags

To fill the bags you’ll want to measure out 15.5 ounces of fill material. If you don’t have a scale but you’re using the plastic corn pellets like we did, it will be about 2 cups.

I suggest just using a scale if you can though because you want to avoid overfilling the bags. When the bags are too full, they have a higher chance of busting open while you’re playing.

We used a piece of paper rolled up to funnel the fill into the bag. Or just dumped it straight from the measuring cup into the gap we left when sewing.

Seal Cornhole Bags

Once the bags are filled, the last thing you have to do is sew up that gap we left to completely seal the cornhole bag. This was easier done by hand rather than using the sewing machine because it was only about a 2 inch section left to sew.

And that’s it! It’s a pretty easy project overall. We were able to finish all 8 cornhole bags in just around a couple hours.

If you decide after reading this that it’s too much work to make these, you could always buy Regulation Cornhole Bags (link to Amazon) online. Be careful though, some of the bags I’ve found online won’t be made of the right materials for a true cornhole game.

Helpful Links:

Sharing is caring!