Craft #3 - Recycling Plastic Grocery Bags for Reuse or for Crafting

This week's craft is a two for one deal!  And both tutorials are all about recycling those plastic bags you get when you go grocery shopping.  

I don't know about you, but whenever I go grocery shopping, I come home with at least a dozen plastic bags.  We like to use them for garbage bags in our small bathroom garbage cans, but I've found that when we stored the bags shoved inside another bag, it took up a lot of space.

For example, the bag pictured above is one of the big bags from Walmart.  I counted the bags inside.  There are sixty (five dozen), but look how big it is.  It may squish, but without squishing it, it measures about two feet by one and a half feet by one foot.

However, when I take a little bit of time, I can fold my bags and store them in a neater manner.  I can fit 11 dozen bags total between these two boxes pictured in front of the bag in this picture.  That's over twice the amount of bags in about half the space.

Want to learn how?

First, lay a bag in front of you, and flatten it.

Then fold it in half length-wise.

Fold it in half length-wise again, with the shorter side on top of the long side (handles).

Starting at the bottom of the bag, fold one side over to the other to form a point.

Continue folding each triangle over itself until you get to where the shorter side ended and you are left with just the handles, making sure there is a flat side lined up with it.

Then take the handles of the bag and tuck them inside the pocket left by the folds.  This will leave you with a triangle.

These triangles can then be stored in a box or some other container of your choice.  The two boxes that I have my bags stored in take up much more space than when we kept them in bags.  In the future, I might paint the boxes or cover them in scrapbook paper or fabric to make them look nice too.


Now, onto Part 2 of today's tutorials:  Making Plarn!

What is plarn?  Plarn is the abbreviation of plastic yarn.  It is made by cutting plastic bags into strips and knotting them together to make a long 2-ply strand.  It can then be used like yarn to crochet or knit projects. I'll share some projects later, but for now, let's learn how to make plarn since it's a great way to recycle the plastic grocery bags that you don't want to save to reuse as garbage bags.  When making plarn, I like to keep the colors separate (a gray ball made with gray bags, a white ball made with white bags, a brown ball made with brown bags, etc.).  The writing on the bags may be different colors, but I keep the main color the same.  You can do a mixture of different colored bags together to make a variegated "yarn,"  but I think that would look best if the amounts of each color were pretty even.

First, start the same way you did when folding the bags by flattening out a bag and folding it in half twice lengthwise.  Then cut off the top where the handles are and the bottom where it is sealed together.  Cut the rest into strips that are about 1" wide.

When you unfold the strips, you have loops.  Start with two of the loops to start making your plarn.

Overlap the loops and reach through one loop and under the other to grab the end of the first loop your are reaching through to twist them together.

Pull them tight to form a knot.  You want to pull tight enough to make a tight knot so they won't come apart, but be careful not to pull too hard or tight because you don't want to stretch the plastic enough that it rips.  I've had that happen to me a few times now.

Then connect another loop to the second loop, and continue connecting the loops to make your long "yarn."
Once you have your long "yarn", you can roll it into a ball.  To do this, I start by wrapping it five times around two of my fingers.

Then I remove it from my fingers, fold that in half and wrap 5 times around it in the opposite direction.

I continue wrapping the plarn around the ball that is forming, switching directions after every five times around.  After using 5 bags worth of loops to make the plarn, the diameter of the ball of plarn was as big as three of my fingers held together.

After I used all 18 gray bags that I had left sitting around, the ball fit perfectly into my hand.  It was almost as big as the balls I get when I wind a skein of yarn into a ball.