Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

OR: How Happy Can One Girl Be Over A Bag?

There are so many knitting and crochet books available these days which is a huge change in the last 10 to 15 years. I frequently have a quick perusal of the books in the library as I nearly always find a book new to me. One of these books was Not Your Mama's Crochet which was edited by (at that time) a local designer. One of the designs was a bag made from what I call carrier bags, the plastic part of the now redundant question "paper or plastic?"

I duly saved the required number of bags but didn't do anything with them. Mainly because I didn't want to go to the work of cutting them up and crocheting them to end up with something embarrassingly awful. But in the interests of using up my stash (used bags count as stash?) and because I didn't crochet at all in 2009, I decided to go ahead with the project.

Basically there were three parts:- cutting the bags into strips, joining the strips and crocheting the bag.

So let the excitement begin.
Here we have the bags waiting to be cut up. In the interests of full disclosure they are from the Co-op but they are not the current design. These ones have green and some black print. I used my rotary cutter and three was the best number to cut together. They were very staticy (is that a word?) and clung together.



Here are the bags now cut into strips.




I was full of grand ideas and I was going to join the strips into one big ball before starting to crochet but that soon got boring. I'm not sure how many I joined before I started, but once started I joined strips in as needed. I put all the strips into a bag and just took them out as they came, I didn't plan the order of the pattern. At one point, I joined a new strip at the beginning of the round so I counted how many strips were needed for a round, I then put three times that number to one side for the handle round and the rounds after. Except as you know the best laid plans.....when I ran out of strips instead of unpicking my work back to the beginning of the round, I took some strips from my saved pile to finish the round, thinking it wouldn't matter as I had over estimated. No such luck! I needed a few more strips to finish the last round and the bags I had used were old so what was I going to use, but in the bottom of the bag where I keep carrier bags I found some old design Co-op bags to save the day.

So here it is in all its glory.




The finished size is approx. 25 cm width and 19 cm depth and I used just over 18 bags. The handles were purchased at a fabric store.