When life gives you plastic bags, so make plarn, namely yarn from plastic bags! I usually walk to and from the grocery store for our weekly food shopping, and as is widely popular here in Israel, I then have the purchase delivered. The store I’m currently shopping at packs the food in plastic bag lined crates, and at your door they simply remove the plastic bag from the crate and deposit it at your front door. The bags happen to be huge and rectangular, and you know me, I just couldn’t bear to throw them out. So naturally I took a few minutes to make this large ball from three of these bags. What will I make? I don’t know quite yet, but it sure is a great feeling to have some balls of plastic bag yarn waiting for you in your stash. Certainly preferable than adding them to the land fill!
Take a look at my crocheted plastic bag placemat project from the archives to get inspired, and stay tuned for another fun plastic bag crocheting project coming next week. Making yarn from plastic bags is really lots of fun and you can quite simply add to your ball every time a new plastic bag comes into your life!
How To Make Plarn, Plastic Bag Yarn:
You’ll need lots of light weight grocery bags, plain white, colored, and with printing on them. If you look closely at the photo above, you’ll see some red flecks within the white, this is a result of using bags with red printing on them!
I didn’t keep track of how many bags I used for the place mat, but in addition to one large orange garbage bag, and one large blue bag from a home store, I used roughly 20-30 bags.
Follow the steps below and you’ll have some “plarn” for your first project in no time:
Step 1: Smooth out the bag and cut on the dotted red lines. These portions are garbage. The bottom of thin bags usually has a gusset (pleat) on each side which should be cut open with scissors.
Step 2: Carefully fold or roll the bag horizontally to create a 1 inch wide roll. Cut the bag as shown at intervals of about 3/4″ inch (2.5cm). You can experiment with the width depending on the size of crochet hook you are using, but much thinner than this will result in a weaker fabric. The pieces that you’ve cut should be closed loops.
Step 1: Now you will make yarn by joining one loop to another like this. Place one loop on top of another.
The loop on the right should be on top of the loop on the left.
Step 2: Pull the top of the loop under and around the loop on the left, and back up through itself.
Step 3. Pull gently until you’ve formed a knot. Continue to add loops to this piece in the same way. Do a few bags worth for starters, you can always add more loops while in the middle of crocheting. Also, if you want to do planned stripes, you’ll have to add loops of a different color at the end of a row.
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