Plarn Thing

My plarn adventure started with the desire to make something useful out of things I have on hand, items that I have in abundance.  I found a Pinterest pin that I wanted to use as a reference for something similar, if not exactly the same.
Here is the link to that tutorial. Practical and cute!
 Make a basket out of plastic bags! 

I thought about the neverending pile of plastic bags we’ve accumulated from trips to the grocery.  I don’t throw them out.  That seems so wasteful.  It’s handy to have a few plastic bags around, anyway.  I reuse them often, whether it’s to take something to work on the fly, or to return items to people or to the store, or most recently, as a trash bag to have right on hand when I was sick and using a lot of tissues.  I always use them for waste basket bags.  BUY the mini trash bags at the store?  Are you kidding?

But as convenient as they are to have, one can accumulate too many.  I’ve been noodling around with the idea of having all reusable bags when we go to the store, but I haven’t yet committed to that.  It’ll happen, and I don’t have any good excuses.  Just bad ones.  Walking around a grocery store with several bags on your person would feel awkward, for one thing.  Who cares?  I don’t.  Sort of.  Well…that and it takes forethought.  Something I tend to lack.  But I look at the reusable bags they have for sale with a hint of guilt combined with indignation.  They want to SELL me these reusable bags?  Ha!  I could MAKE those.

But I don’t.  That’s going to change.  It will.  I don’t know how soon, but it will.

I started thinking about what I’d seen on Pinterest.  Why couldn’t I use the large knitting loom to make a plarn basket?  Well, sure!  So I got to work.

Here’s what I used:
*Lots and lots and LOTS of plastic grocery sacks

*Scissors

*Large round loom

*Loom pick

This process is a little time consuming.  Because unlike regular loom knitting with soft & fuzzy store bought yarn, you have to make the raw supply first.

To make plarn:

Fold the plastic bag in half. 
Fold it in half again. 
Cut off the bottom of the bag. 
Cut off the top of the bag.

Cut the remaining folded portion into strips.  Mine were about 2 ½ fingertips wide.  Yeah, I wasn’t terribly precise. 

I made a large stash of these little folded-up strips before I got started.  I think I used about 5 bags before I even went on to the next stage of the process.  It’s easier to do it this way so you can work for a while before you have to stop knitting and go back to cutting strips.

Start putting your plarn together.  To do this, take two of the folded-up strips.  Unfold them.  Make a lark’s head knot.  I didn’t know what that meant, initially, so I had to do a little research.  Then trial and error.  Describing it is difficult, so I won’t try. It’s very simple to do, just tough to explain. 

You’ll quickly start accumulating enough plarn to roll into a ball.  Once you feel you have enough, it’s time to load the loom.  Then it’s exactly like anything else you make on a round loom.  I’ve posted videos of that before.  You will probably run out of plarn before the project is done.  Just make more, adding one piece at a time to the end of your roll until you have a big ball of it again.

So how did this work out?  

 
It was okay, not bad for a first attempt.  It isn’t sturdy enough to stand on its own with much stability, so it looks sort of like a rolly brim hat made with plastic bags.  I couldn’t decide if I wanted it to have a handle once I realized it wouldn’t be a proper waste basket.  So it’s just…sort of…a thing.  A basket/bag thing.  At least, it is right now.  It can be used for any number of purposes.  Do you know what I want to try?  I’d like to iron it to see if it makes a solid and sturdier material, like other projects I’ve seen on Pinterest.  Unfortunately, I don’t own an iron.  Or if I do, it’s in storage in another city.

So what can I do with this?  It could be a shower caddy, because it’s waterproof and has little holes for drainage.  Add a handle and it can just be a bag, for anything, made from bags.  How fitting. Right now, it's holding extra yarn.

 
I haven’t given up on making stuff out of plarn.  I get excited when I end up with plastic bags of different colors.  My first project was very brown, with a few flecks of blue from the writing on the bags. Not an attractive brown, either. Sort of the color of raw meat when it’s lost its pink.  Blah.  Next time I want to make something more vibrant.  But obtaining a large number of “pretty” plastic bags to work with is not as simple as I would like.  It’ll take some time. 

What’s next?  Lots and lots of things of a crafty nature!  Yay!