What you ask is plarn? It’s a combination of the words yarn and plastic, so it’s essentially “yarn” made from discarded plastic grocery bags. Those plastic grocery bags are a scourge on the environment, they always seem to find their way into woods and waterways, where they are often mistaken for food by wildlife. One of the things we like to do to celebrate Earth Day is to make use of materials that are traditionally discarded and/or littering natural areas. This can be from trash collected during clean ups (my first first public sculpture when I was in high school were giant trees made from trash collected during a big clean up!) or trash from your home and school that you can divert from the landfill and make something useful with. Grocery bags are one of my favorite materials to craft with believe it or not, there are a number of different techniques and useful thing that can be made from them. They are also one of the most common types of trash we find mucking up the natural areas around us.
Making Plarn
Making plarn is a pretty simple process and once you get the hang of it you can kind of assembly line it. You can also assign kids jobs by age to involve everyone. You can make your plarn from bags of many different colors, you can separate out colors and make individual colors or, if you want you can use makers to make the colors you want on white or light colored bags. This is tedious but produces lovely results. (The snail at the top was made this way) Add the at step two when teh handles are cut off, but the bag is not yet folded.
Materials:
- plastic grocery bags
- scissors
Method:
Lay a bag out on a table and flatten it as neatly as you can. Cut the handles off the top and about a 1/2 inch off the bottom so you are essentially left with a big tube.
Fold the now handle-less and bottom-less bag into thirds lengthwise.
Begin cutting strips that are 1/2- 1 inch thick all the way down the folded bag.
When you unfold those strips you will have big loops, unfold all of them.
Lay two of the loops so one is over top the other.
From the top, pull the left loop to the right. From the bottom, pull the right loop to the left. This will bring them into a knot. Pull it tight, but not so tight that it stretches or warps the plastic.
Continue connecting loops this way until you have a long chain. The loops become like a double ply of the same strand. You can roll it up into a ball or start tube knitting right away!
Tube Knitting with your plarn:
Once you have a nice long length of plarn you can wind it up into a ball and do just about anything you would be able to do with yarn: knitting, crocheting weaving etc. Follow the directions for tube knitting HERE with you plarn to make simple knitted tubes that you can use for a variety of fun purposes. (Like the necklace and snail shown above! You could also take some inspiration from some contemporary artists who use plarn:
If you are like me, you want to do something with all of those handles you cut off the bags– try making a wreath! This wreath uses a wire coat hanger bent into a circle and the bag handles are just tied on!
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