Plastic Bag Bag

A few weeks ago I was trying to find new uses for those pesky plastic grocery bags. They pile up faster than you can reuse them! Two years ago, Jonathon and I started to bring our own bags to the grocery stores and farmers markets, and it really has helped a lot. But we still manage to accumulate them somehow.

Aside from the usual trash can liner and our other common "re-uses" I wanted to find some different ideas. (In a later post, I'll list some of the re-use ideas we commonly use at our house.) I found a lot of interesting stuff, but my favorite was crocheting with plastic bags! Since we bring our own bags to the store anyway, I thought that this would be a great way to reuse them more than once without throwing them away.

I checked out a few patterns, pictures, and methods of making the yarn to get an idea of what works best, and decided to give it a try myself. A few weeks into the project, the bag is about 5 inches high with an 9 x 11 inch rectangular bottom. Ultimately, I would like it to be about 10-12 inches deep. I'm experimenting with different colors and strengths of bags, using primarily #2 plastic. (Saving #4 bags for a later project)

I consider this to be the "guinea pig" bag, just to gain experience how easy or difficult the different plastics are to work with.

The bottom is mainly Safeway bags. I sorted out the pieces that were mostly plain, beause I wanted to use the pieces with the logos for patterns later. The "stripes" mark the experiments with different plastic. The white, pearly stripes are a large clear plastic bag a friend was happy to get out of her house. It was about the size of a trash bag. The pink stripe is from an Asian grocery store. Although it was marked #2, it was definitely thinner than the Safeway bags. The last, and current stripe are newspaper bags our San Francisco Chronicle arrives in. Because they are #4 plastic, they're the most stretchy of them all.

I've received lots of eager donations of plastic from my family, friends, and neighbors. LOTS. Let's just say that I am not accepting any more donations!!! I'm up to my ears in plastic. It took me about 3 days just to sort and cut up the clean bags -- I haven't even looped them together for the yarn yet!

Eventually I'll finish this project, but as usual, I have a few projects on the go....and rarely finish them. But this time I'm determined to finish!