Homemade Juggling Beanbag Guide

Homemade Juggling Beanbag GuideGuide last edited 11/11/2025

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The Complete Homemade Juggling Beanbag Guide by Joshua Clifton

Third Edition - Now a multi-document guide

A comprehensive instructional guide and technical treatise on designing and making spherical, paneled beanbags for juggling and footbagging, with patterns for all designs pictured above

Downloads<br>Please do not link directly to these files. If I ever change the file names or directory locations, the links will no longer work. Link to this page instead.

Normal versions have 600dpi patterns & images, Smalls have 150dpi. Save PDFs to the same folder for cross-document links to work (may not work in mobile PDF viewers).

Complete Guide Zip File<br>Edited 11/11/2025 (Last important edit: 9/17/2024)

Homemade Juggling Beanbag Guide.zip – Normal version (227MB)

Homemade Juggling Beanbag Guide (sm).zip – Small file size version (64MB)

Individual Guide Documents<br>(last edited date in parentheses)

1 - Homemade Juggling Beanbag Guide - Index & Supplementary Chapters.pdfNormal | Small (11/11/2025)

2-Panel Baseball Chapter.pdfNormal | Small (11/11/2025)

4 & 6-Panel Orange Peel Ball Chapter.pdfNormal | Small (4/16/2025)

4-Panel Spherical Tetrahedron Chapter.pdfNormal | Small (11/11/2025)

6-Panel Spherical Cube Chapter.pdfNormal | Small (11/11/2025)

8-Panel Spherical Octahedron Chapter.pdfNormal | Small (11/11/2025)

12-Panel Simplified Volleyball (Cube) Chapter.pdfNormal | Small (11/11/2024)

12-Panel Spherical Dodecahedron Chapter.pdfNormal | Small (11/11/2025)

12-Panel Spherical Rhombic Dodecahedron Chapter.pdfNormal | Small (9/27/2024)

14-Panel Spherical Cuboctahedron & Trunc Octahedron Chapter.pdfNormal | Small (9/17/2024)

14-Panel Spherical Equidistant Cuboctahedron Chapter.pdfNormal | Small (5/24/2025)

24-Panel Deltoidal Icositetrahedron Chapter.pdfNormal | Small (9/17/2024)

26-Panel Rhombicuboctahedron Chapter.pdfNormal | Small (10/1/2024)

30-Panel Rhombic Triacontahedron Chapter.pdfNormal | Small (9/17/2024)

32-Panel Equidistant Trunc Icosahedron Chapter.pdfNormal | Small (9/29/2024)

32-Panel Color Arrangements.pdfNormal | Small (10/1/2024)

Other Files

Juggling Beanbag Patterns by Joshua Clifton.pdf (10/8/2024) – A full compilation of all my juggling beanbag patterns from the instructional guide documents, without any beanbag-making instructions. Just a convenience for those who only need the patterns.

Blank Juggling Beanbag Color Arrangement Diagrams.zip – Open these .PNG diagrams with an image editor (or print them) to experiment with your own color arrangements. Includes balls and assembly layout diagrams for the 6 – 32-panel designs. (My guide has ready-to-print diagrams for the 12 – 32-panel designs, which will be more convenient for printing than these.) Below are some of the more striking examples of what I have created with these diagrams.

How to Make Juggling Beanbags (First Edition, latest).pdf – The original guide, latest draft (9/9/2018), just for nostalgia and comparison

How to Make Juggling Beanbags (First Edition, earliest).pdf – The original guide, earliest draft (11/8/2012), just for nostalgia and comparison

About This Project

For those who share my interest I have written an instructional guide and technical treatise on designing, assembling, and sewing the fabric sphere panel structures pictured at the top of this page, as well some additional variations.

The focus of this project is on making juggling beanbags, but I also provide information on how to use the designs to make footbags, and about making cloth balls for other purposes. My patterns and formulas could theoretically be used to make balls of any size from flat panels of any material, and I provide the mathematics and theory behind my panel designs so their shapes can be improved, or altered for specific applications or materials (see especially Chapter 5 of the first PDF).

The guide is very extensive, being over 750 pages, but is divided into separate PDF documents: one for each panel structure, and a root document with an index to the others and supplementary chapters and appendices.

I have tried to make this work accessible to readers lacking technical knowledge, making it easy for them to simply print the patterns and sew the beanbags without having to wade through technical information, yet also include all the information that will enable those with a mathematical background and interest in the geometry and design theories to delve deeper and satisfy their curiosity and understand how these designs are created. The boldfacing I use throughout the documents are an attempt to enable readers to scan the documents quickly and...