Crocheted Bag Made of Plastic Bags (Part 1)

Once again, I apologize for the disgusting quality of the photos I am about to inflict on your eyes.

This project is something I've wanted to try out for about a year now; and this week I decided I was just going to jump in and do it even though I couldn't remember where I saved the instructions I'd found online, or if there even were any -- perhaps I'd just been meaning to search the web for some concrete steps, and hadn't actually found some... Anyway, the point was, I was not about to over-research the thing again, but instead wing it.

I lost count of how many plastic bags I used (I'm going to guess at least fifty), and I ran out before the project was finished.

So, there are two reasons this is a two-part post (I'll have the second part up sometime before the end of July, most likely -- unless I hear loud protests to this plan, haha); the first is that, of course, the project is not completed; the second, that I have neither the time nor the plastic bags to finish it at this time.

OKAY! Obviously, tonight is a blabber-fest. Please bear with me. :)

To start --

I grabbed my stash of plastic bags, my trusty scissors, and a size Q (US) crochet hook (not pictured below).

Firstly --

the thing was to get the bags into some sort of resemblance to string, so I could crochet with it. I flattened one out, cut off the bottom, and sliced the rest into horizontal strips about 2 inches thick. (I did not measure exactness -- this is a sloppy-slappy project I am doing.) The last part left was the handles. I tossed that piece, and the bottom of the bag.

Each strip was now a loop of crooked plastic. I joined them using a lark's head knot.

Then I had a length of uneven, knotty, plastic string to work with. :)

Secondly --

to crochet the bottom of the bag, I worked a chain, then used a pattern of single-crochet stitches and chain-one's to expand around the beginning chain, making extra stitches in the corners to keep the flatness.

(If anyone is interested in more exact instructions, I can try to work some out for later.)

Thirdly --

when I had the bottom roughly how big I thought I wanted it (it was actually a little smaller than I wished it to be, but whatevs), I left off putting the extra stitches in the corners of the rounds, beginning to form the sides.

I had a couple of different colors in bags from different stores, so I went for a little striping.

AND THIS PROJECT WILL BE COMPLETED AT A LATER DATE.

Some notes:

I didn't put all the string together at once. I added pieces as needed, and it is a fairly painless procedure.

Working with the slippery-yet-grippy plastic strips and the huge plastic crochet hook is slightly more challenging than I had originally thought it would be. I had to revert to the technique I started fumbling with when I first began to learn crochet, and it brought back some multi-colored memories.

You REALLY don't need to be precise with this. Especially if you don't care if the final result is lumpy and funky.

SO THAT'S IT FOR NOW -- Let me know if you super don't want to hear the rest of this madness -- maybe you would just settle for a picture of the completed bag, or maybe it hurts your optical orbs too much and you would really rather be spared another sight of the project I'm cobbling together. Haha!

Seriously, let me know. :)


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UPDATE:

Part 2 can be found here!
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