How To Make Plarn – Plastic Yarn Tutorial

Plarn Tutorial
Plarn is a term that was coined by combining the words “plastic” and “yarn.” Creating plarn is a great way to re-purpose the bags that you bring home from the grocery store into something useful so that you don’t have to dump them in a landfill. I personally enjoy using plarn to crochet rugs for our garage for my husband to put his dirty boots on. It is quick (and fun) to make and I usually get about 9 yards out of one plastic bag. The roll you see above is approximately 5 bags rolled into a ball.

Materials Needed

  • Plastic Bags
  • Scissors

Instructions

Step 1: Lay your plastic bag flat. Fold in the sides so that they are straight like shown in the photo below. Grocery bags come in all colors. My grocery store happens to have yellow bags, so that is the color of yarn I am making today.

Lay Bag Flat

Step 2: Fold the plastic bag in half.

Fold in Half

Step 3: Fold the plastic bag in half again.

Fold in Half Again

Step 4: Cut off the handles and the bottom end and dispose of these pieces.

Discard Ends

Step 5: Cut bag into strips about 1″ thick.

Cut Strips

Step 6: One at a time, unfold the strips and lay them out flat.

Plarn Strips

Step 7: Join two strips by creating a lark’s head knot. 

Knot

Continue to unfold and join each of the plastic strips with a knot to form one long piece. Roll the plarn into a ball for easy use when you start your next knit or crochet project.

What projects do you use plarn for?

Linked Up At:

Tip Me Tuesday Button

3 Comments

  1. I just posted about all kinds of different yarns you can make from recycled things recently, and plastic bags was one. i have a ton of them, that I want to turn into yarn! I can’t wait :)

    1. I’ll have to stop by and visit your posts. I love making yarn out of tshirts, bags and other materials. I told my husband I want a spinning wheel and an alpaca for Christmas :) LOL

  2. Mary Bearden says:

    Stopping by from the blog hop and a new follower of your blog thru GFC, RSS Feed and Twitter. I would have followed on FB but had an incident with them 2 weeks ago and I have a post on my blog dated 8/20 explaining why so that I don’t have a long comment here. I have left it to each blogger if they want to follow me now on FB or wait until I follow you first. Please leave a comment on my blog letting me know which you did as I am keeping a list of people I need to catch up with. Thanks for your help and have a great week!

    Mary

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.