Knit for Brains

How to save the planet with Knitting.

More and more lately I’ve become irritated by the prevalence of plastic in my life. Even when I try to buy less plastic, more of it comes home with me. I’ve been trying to use less, as well as shift to BPA-free containers. I stopped drinking out of the large plastic tumblers I’ve been using for years now. I won’t store food in plastic unless it’s just in the freezer, and I’m no longer buying baked goods that come in those plastic boxes at the grocery. For a while I was still buying my croissants there and couldn’t bring myself to throw away the tubs, which are about six inches deep, fifteen long and twelve wide. I have a stack of six of them with their lids and hope either to find a use for them or a friend who has recycling in their neighborhood.

So what about knitting in all this? I have all these plastic grocery bags. Yes, I can take them to the recycling box at the store, and I keep some in the car and take a few in to use when I shop, but I came up with another idea for recycling these spawn of petroleum.

Last weekend one of my cats, Lucy, got hold of a ball of yarn and was nuzzling it to death. I rescued it before it became a hopeless tangle and gave her a small ball of Wool-ease bulky to play with, but she wasn’t crazy about the acrylic any more than I was, so I sat down and crocheted her a ball out of the wool she was nuzzling. It is just a simple free-form ball you can make up as you go, so don’t look for instructions here. Anyways, when I was done I stuffed one of my stash of grocery bags inside and crocheted it shut.

Lucy loves it. The plastic bag inside makes a soft rustling noise, but the toy is soft and squishy and she can nuzzle it all she wants and it won’t come apart.

So my next thought is that a great way for us to recycle these bags is to use them to stuff pet toys and kids toys and even pillows. It occurred to me that the bags would shift around a bit in a pillow so, thinking about plarn, I came up with the idea to knit or crochet a pillow blank from bags to make a stable foundation for a pillow or other toy. Crochet is easier to do for this and all you really need is structure, not appearances.

But as you know, plarn can be laborious to make. So I came up with Super Plarn. To make super plarn take a bag and find the two insets or gussets on either side of the bottom of the bag. Pinch them together and then pierce a hole across the bag with your fingers. Then take the handles of the next bag and thread it through this hole. Next, thread the bottom of the second bag through it’s own handles and pull it tight. Keep repeating this until you have enough to work with. Because of the varying thickness of the result – handles are less bulky – it won’t look so good but this works fine for stuffing material since it won’t show.

Because of the bulky linking “knots” you may not love the feel if you draw them very tight, but if you keep those links between bags a bit loose it won’t be bad. You could also just cut the bags sideways in very wide bands and link them that way but you would be wasting the handles and bottoms.

Here’s a pic of five bags finger-crocheted together:

I tried crocheting this with a size Q crochet hook but it was difficult and tight and not really necessary. Just finger-crochet a chain wide enough for your pillow, chain one or two more, then turn and skip one or two links and begin either a chain stitch or single crochet back in the other direction. IMPORTANT: start crocheting or knitting with a handle end of the super plarn chain so you can add more bags to the bag-bottom end if you run out.

Keep going until you can fold up this pad to the bulkiness you want for your pillow or toy or whatever. The result will be a stable, squishy pillow form with a soft crinkle sound that will remind you of how you are saving the planet, one pillow and dozens of plastic bags at a time.

Related Posts:

• Recycling Yarn, Part 2: Starting with a New Sweater
• Knit A Scarf – Fast!
• Is This Wool? How to Test Before You Knit
• Getting My Yarn Stash Under Control!