If you have been reading this blog (and I often wonder if anyone but my devoted sister-in-law does) then you know that my goal for this year (call it a New Year’s Resolution if you MUST, but I don’t) was to be more environmentally friendly. You might also remember that in a not-so-distant past-entry how I crocheted a lunch bag from strips of old plastic grocery bags. I had promised myself a new, reusable grocery sack and now that idea has come to fruition- just not quite in the way I expected.
The first stumbling block I came across was the sheer amount of bags needed to create a crocheted bag. I know crochet takes a lot of yarn (or “plarn”- i.e. plastic yarn) but the amount needed for a full-size grocery bag was ludicrous! I had to find another way to recycle the remaining plastic bags at my disposal and create a reusable bag.
So after reading extensively in the Reuse/Recycle section of Craftster (http://www.craftster.org/ a new on-line obsession of mine) I decided to cobble together a creation from cannibalized plastic bags. Plastic bags from all sorts of stores were fused, trimmed and stitched together to create a bag that is bigger than a paper grocery sack and about 10 times as strong.
Curious as to my methodology? I really can’t take the credit- this has been done by hundreds of crafty people already and there are lots of tutorials if you know where to look, but I’ll give a brief synopsis:
Basically, you want to take all your plastic bags and flatten them out. Cut off the handles and the bottom. Now you have a plastic "tube." Turn this inside out if there is any writing or decoration on the bag because the ink will sometimes run when you fuse the bags. You can either stack a couple bags on top of each other or fold the bags until there are 6-8 layers of plastic. I ended up folding one bag a couple of times until there were 8 layers.
Next you want to place the layered plastic between two sheets of heavy paper. I used construction paper since I had it on hand. Heat a regular house iron somewhere in the medium range. Some people have said they used a much cooler setting, but I'm the impatient type and it wasn't fusing fast enough for me on a cooler setting. First iron one side, then flip, and iron on the other. Don't pull the paper apart immediately because you may tear holes in the still-hot plastic. If you wait the plastic will peel away from the paper as it cools. If the plastic isn't quite fused yet cover with paper and iron again.
This step takes some getting used to since if you iron too long the plastic may melt too much and create holes. If you don't iron long enough the plastic won't fuse. I'd recommend giving it a try with the bags you don't like as much just to get the hang of it.
As a side note: I did this in the garage with the doors open because I'm not sure if there are toxic chemicals released into the air during the fusing and I didn't want to make my dogs (or husband) sick.
After I'd fused the plastic bags I started trimming them down into squares and rectangles. I'm not sure what other people's experiences are with fusing, but my fused bags did NOT come out square or even.
After that I pieced together the front, back, sides and bottom of the bag, overlapping the plastic pieces the tiniest bit and sewing everything together on my sewing machine with a zigzag stitch and some old thread.
Since this bag hasn't been road-tested yet I'm not sure how sturdy the cut-in handles are, but overall it certainly feels like it should be worth its weight in... um... plastic.
-Lyzard
