How to Sew Sandbags for Flood Control

 

This post on How to Sew Sandbags in the military style.  It came about because I wanted to learn how to use a sewing machine, and wanted something easy to make that was useful and cheap.

Sandbags are a great thing to have in storage, they have multiple uses, last a long time, and you can fit many of them in a small space. I have wanted some for a while, but they can be expensive unless you buy pallets worth at a time.

Here are the basic instructions:

• All I did was to buy a couple yards of burlap
• folded it in half on the long edge
• Next I marked and cut it into 14 inch strips
• I found that easiest way to go about constructing the bag was to take a piece of twine and sew in a drawstring channel first. I did this by folding over the short ends of the burlap strip and sewing the channels. For looks and strength the folded over ends of the channel should face the same direction.
• Run a length of twine into the two channels.
• Next sew down both long ends making a bag.
• For storage, that’s all you need to do, but turn them inside out before you actually use them.

For $20 of burlap, and $3 worth of twine, I got 12 bags with a little burlap and a lot of twine left over. So the bags cost about $2 a piece. (not counting labor).  It was not hard to figure out how to sew sandbags.

As a bonus, here is an old Army Corps of Engineer Video on using sandbags