January Projects

I have been inspired by my son’s love of recycling and I am working on plarn projects. Plarn is yarn made from cutting down plastic bags.

Taking the bags to the store to be recycled is an option but too often I see the collection bins are overflowing with no room for new additions.

Most people can only schedule going to the grocery store once a week and if they have their bag of bags to be recycled and the collection bin is full that day, one of 2 things can happen. One possible scenario is that they toss the bag back into their car and hopefully will remember to get them when they return next week. The second one is that they don’t bother with it and toss them into the nearby trash can because they don’t want to mess with them and, quite frankly, it’s just easier when dealing with the chaos of every day life.

I’m hoping to help offset/reduce the number of the plastic bags going to the landfills.

I know that the thickness and quality of the bags has greatly reduced over the years. I’m not sure if it is due to the recycling process and the bags are being made of recycled bags, yay if so, or if the cost of the bags have gone up and it is just more cost effective for the stores to go with the thinner, cheaper bags.

Either way, the feasibility of reusing the thinner plastic bags for groceries isn’t there. The thinner bags aren’t durable enough anymore to hold up to another round of canned goods and produce.

This month as everyone is working on their ‘health’ resolutions, I want to work on the ‘health’ of our environment. For the month of January, I am going to explore all the things that can be made/crocheted by using plastic grocery bags.

My first project is a good sized grocery bag, something that is not too large or too small. This can be used for groceries, library books or anything. This is just my first attempt at it and I made the pattern up as I went. The bag has a single crochet (sc) base and alternating single crochet (sc) and half double crochet (hdc) sides. I finished the top with a single crochet (sc) crab stitch and 2 – 2 row single crochet (sc) handles.