Okay so in LA they’ve had the reusable bag and thick plastic bag for ten cents going on for years but in Vegas they still give you thin plastic bags at every store but they’re these really thin shitty bags that you pretty much can’t reuse because they barely survive the trip from the car to the house.
So basically this is how I tell you that I’ve started making plarn that I’m crocheting into a plarn basket that I will use to hold the plarn balls I make in the future in order to control how many plastic bags are pouring out of our cabinets.
3. Cut diagonally into the plastic until the strand is about as thick as you want it to be. (Probably aim for at least an inch thick, it doesn’t have to be super even all the way around but you don’t want it to get so thin that the strand will break)
4. Cut in a spiral until you run out of bag and then diagonally cut your way out of the final loop.
5. Tie the end of the strand to the end of whatever you were working on or to the last stand you cut.
6. Wind or crochet like any other bulky yarn.
The gray disk at the bottom of this post is the bottom of my basket, I’m using an N/10mm hook in a double-crocheted spiral. (I’ve just started the first layer of elevation)
So far I’m about 10-12 bags in and I’ve been trimming the tails of the joined bags as I go.
(One bag’s worth of plarn goes about halfway around the disk at this point, I think I’m going to do 3-4 more gray bags before I change colors; bags come in 3 general colors around here so this basket is going to be mostly white with gray and brown accents.)
Also save the bag scraps, you can use them as stuffing. I’m gonna make a big fucking pincushion with mine. It’s gonna be a cube made out of the leftover cat fabric that I don’t want to use for masks.
Worked my way through the ball in the first photoset, made some more balls. I’m intrigued by the way the patterns on the white bags show up. I’ve got some Ross and 99 cent store bags in the next white ball to add some purple and blue-green to the mix.
Making this basket might actually exhaust my current supply of plastic bags, so I’ve asked my dad to set aside his thicker bags for me in LA so I can compare working both materials.
Kind of get the feeling that I’m going to be a complete gremlin and make a laundry hamper out of the thicker plastic.
Oh this is totally apocalypse punk! Makes me want to make my own for use in small grocery runs. Or just to write a scrappy band of fictional survivors using them, haha.
NGL, cutting apart a pile of plastic trash and turning it into thread and rolling it into balls and crocheting it into fabric does feel like some variety of cyberpunk Rumplestiltskin shit.
Idk that I’d call it ugly because the white part with the little flecks is so cute.
Tags:
#art #domesticity #the more you know #fun with loopholes #apocalypse cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Brinens and Things 