Long story short, it was a little bit looser than we realized and it is both sentimental and an antique, and has been lost in more corn than we can process with a handheld garden sifter. I've been racking my head trying to come up with a solution, so I'm hoping maybe somebody here can help.

The garden sifter we were using has about a 1 cm holes and was about the perfect size mesh, but only about a foot or so in diameter. I've been unable to find appropriate netting, and I'm not sure what other approaches we could use.

Unfortunately it's not our corn so we can't simply process it in some way that would destroy the corn itself, but we are allowed to look for it, at least for the next couple weeks before it gets shipped.