Inaugural Plarn Project

Moxie Rule of Life #458: One can never have too many sturdy bags. 

After tackling a fair portion of my dog food bag stash to make shopping bags, I noticed that the flimsy plastic bag used to store flimsy plastic bags was sort of... um... overflowing. (Note to self: Reusable shopping bags are veritably useless if you leave them at home or in the car.)  I'd bookmarked a plarn tutorial a while ago, so I set about cutting, assembling, and rolling a good-sized ball of plarn. 

I cut and plarned all the bags I could find, without any real regard to color except to mix them up a bit for variegation. I knew I was making a grocery-shopping bag, and since it was my first foray into plarn, I figured I wouldn't care about color.  And I was wrong.  After I'd finished crocheting the bottom of the bag and gotten a good half dozen rows up the sides, I decided I hate that Kroger-bag brown. Ick.  But I was too far into the project, and it is just a grocery sack after all, so the finished bag has sort of a spotty brown bovine feel.

It's interesting how this one bag is sort of a snapshot of my life. Bags mostly from Kroger and Walmart, many from Goodwill and Hobby Lobby, and the odd bag from Staples, Old Navy, and Kohl's.

For future projects, I'm going to keep the brown separate, reserved for dish scrubbies and loofahs and such.

By the way, I sort of made up the pattern as I went along, but the basics are:  Chain 20-ish with size N hook. Single crochet in each stitch, 3 sc in the end stitch and then sc again down the other side of the chain and keep sc-ing around, increasing at the ends, until the bottom of the bag is as big as you want it. Do a hdc, then dc around and around and around until it's as tall as you like. Split for handles and sc around until the handles are thick/sturdy enough for your needs.

Dog food bag bag

This project started with a Rangers baseball game. If you've ever been to a major league game, you know that more often than not, there are freebies handed out to spectators as they enter the ballpark. On this particular day, volunteers were handing out sturdy bags bearing the Rangers logo.  Very handy things, these bags. Our entire family attended the game, so we went home with a good collection of reusable shopping bags.  Days later, I got to looking at the bag, and thought, "Huh. These are made out of the same stuff as dog food bags." That sturdy, nearly indestructible woven plastic material that can't really be recycled. We have a big dog that eats big food that comes in those big 40-lb bags, and we'd been throwing those bags away.

So the next time we emptied a new bag into the food bin, I removed all the binding from the bag, folded it neatly, and tucked it away. Did the same with the next bag, and the next, and the next, until I had an embarrassingly large stash of empty dog food bags.

Lest I become a case study on Hoarders, I decided I needed to finally do something with those bags!  So that's been my project this week while I've been home with the crud.

The hardest part of this project is cleaning the bags. Dog food is oily, and I'm still trying to find the easiest/most efficient/inexpensive way to de-oil. So far it's been trial and error, and/or a cumulative effect of several different approaches. And of course some brands are harder to clean than others.

Materials:
~ Woven plastic dog food bag
~ Sewing machine & thread
~ Optional: fabric, webbing, bias tape, bling, etc.

Step 1:  Completely remove binding stitching and tape from top and bottom of bag.
Step 2:  Wash bag thoroughly inside and out.
- - -
Step 3:  Hang dry.

To make two bags, cut down one side seam (can be done before washing to make that step easier), then cut the bag in half. Use the remaining side seam as the bottom, sew up some new side seams, turn down the top and hem, and add some gussets. Add fabric or webbing handles.

To make one big bag, cut two four-inch strips off the top for handles if desired. Sew bottom seam and add gussets. Turn down top and hem.   Fashion handles from strips and attach.

Note: The feed dogs on the sewing machine are veritably useless on plastic, so wrestling the material through your machine and achieving a straight, even seam, takes a bit of practice.