plastic yarn

I followed Gooseflesh's tutorial to make my plastic yarn, pretty much to the letter.

There were a couple of tricks I devised to help streamline the process. The first was how to loop-tie (the way I learned in grade school only works for the first two loops), and the second was how to straighten out bags.


Loop-tying multiple loops:

1) hold strip in left (or non-dominant) hand like so









2) place second strip over first one












3) pull bottom of second strip up through first strip











4) pull tight












Dealing with the fold in grocery bags:

Hook your thumbs into the handle and the bottom seam of the bag. Pull taunt.

This will help the inside folds of the bag (one on each side) lay flat so that they cut evenly later on.


Here we have a finished ball of ten bags and associated waste. Gooshflesh mentions something about using the waste (handles and seams of the bags) as embellishments later on, but that didn't jive with me so I'll be recycling them.

Summery:

A typical grocery bag cut into 1 inch strips will produce 6 1/3 yards of plastic yarn. Sitting in front of the TV with a pair of scissors, a pile of bags and a place to put scraps, I can turn 10 plastic bags into yarn in roughly 45 min. More or less depending on how focused I am ;-)


Here is part of the plastic bag stash that I was able to procure from friends. I laid them out on my workroom floor according to plastic color/ink color combinations.