One person's trash...

Can be the fodder for someone else's creativity!

(Okay, so that's not quite how the saying goes, just bear with me here).

I've previously mentioned my love of making stuff out of what other people would consider trash, and I thought this theme-less week might be a good time to elaborate on that a bit.

I don't know if it's as bad for everyone else, but I seem to always have lots and lots of plastic bags. I'm not sure how they all even got there - I have a sneaking suspicion they're interbreeding while I'm not watching.

I hate getting plastic bags. It means I forgot my reusable ones, and then the plastic ones will just sit around; I don't want to throw them out, but always forget to take them for recycling (and there seem to be so few places that recycle them!). What's a girl to do?

Well, I decided to make plastic yarn (or "plarn") out of them and make something. It's actually a really simple process (if you're interested, there's instructions here, but I didn't want to bore everyone else with a lengthy how-to), though a bit time-consuming since I wanted a lot of plarn. I ended up crocheting a doormat and giant circular rug for my room, and I love both of them.

They're sturdy, colorful without being gaudy, and feel nice on my bare feet. And I used up 200 plastic bags! Whoooo!

(I would insert pictures here, but I'm writing this from a computer without my pictures on them :( I'll put them in when I get back to my computer late this weekend)

My plastic bags are starting to pile up again.... I think I might make a reusable grocery bag out of them. That'd be some excellent poetic justice, right?

What other things do you guys think I should make out of plastic bags? I've unfortunately started running out of ideas. I thought it would be cool to take people's bags and make them into a reusable one for them, but most of the people I run around with are also people who try to avoid getting extra grocery bags.

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This might be outdated now, since I'm writing this on Thursday and will be afk until at least Saturday, but I really like Sophie's idea to make a Facebook group instead of communicating through Your Pants. We all have to be friends for that to work though, so to help things along, here's a link to my Facebook (since I've now just posted that on the interwebs, if you make note that you're one of us in the request space it'd be helpful - there's a whole lot of Sophies, Kaitys, Katies, and Sarahs in the world). Since Sophie's quick I've already friended her and started up a group, so as soon as I get requests from the rest of you we can all be in there :)