Those Plarn Plastic Bags!

Yesterday we had a pretty relaxing day at home. Moyra got all gussied up (with clothes & everything) and headed over to Mam’s house. Mam is one of our grandma words. I love learning about terms of endearment that various folks use for grandparents. We have Mam & Baba…but the guys are all known as grandpa ’round here. My favorites are Baba and Poppy…I’d love those for when they actually apply I think.

While Moyra was off having a wonderful time reading lots of books, playing in Mam’s garden and creating with the fridge magnets galore at her house in town, I was playing with plastic. I don’t like having plastic bags around the little ones, so I jumped at the opportunity to begin my plarnucation without the suffocation risk.

I learned to make the plarn from My Recycled Bags. I searched all over, but these instructions seemed to be the easiest to follow. I also watched about 15 You Tube videos ranging from the very informative to the utterly rediculous. I also searched Etsy for plarn and found some folks selling ready-to-crochet plarn and fabulous plarn made projects!

After cutting up my bags and creating a long plarn chain (while watching The Office and eating leftover pizza for lunch, yum!) I had this HUGE pile of plastic in my living room…

My darling husband was a bit twitchy having to sit next to this bunch of plastic on the floor, and everytime his foot touched it he made a funny little noise and looked at me out of the corner of his eye. He was pretty sweet, though and put up with my project. Good boy.

After all the smoothing, cutting and knotting, I rolled it all up and had this:

As you can see, Amelie thought it was just fabulous! She’s a very ECO baby! I did find that my hands felt totally gross after I was done, so I took my kindof dirty plarn ball away from the baby…ugh giving plastic to babies, what was I thinking (oh yeah…photo for blog, that’s what I was thinking duh), and washed my hands & nursed that sweetie pie into blissful sleep.

THEN:

I did it! It was much more difficult to work than yarn at first, until my hands adjusted to it. After a couple of hours (I crochetted all evening) I was really enjoying working with the stuff. It was bumpy and squishy and I loved the texture of it all. It has a nice stretch, making me think that when my bag is done I’ll be able to fill it with plenty of locally grown vegis and still have room for more!

I was immediately smitten with my new little craft supply, and when we went to Walmart later, I greedily looked at their recycle bins. I spoke with the floor manager, and she said that I could have all that I wanted! I was figuring that it was more ECO friendly for me to take the bags and crochet them, than to have Walmart melt them down to new bags…so I don’t feel bad AT ALL about stealing them out of the recycle bin. I ended up with about two big trashbags full of plarn-o-lific bags to bring home, much to the shagrin of my poor husband, who kept saying “I’m not sure I completely support this” and “I hate those bags around the babies” and other under breath mumbles as I happily carried my trash-to-treasure-swag to the van. I am happy.