Sunday, September 02, 2007

Recycled knitting



After extolling the virtues of recycling at the Rivington Freecycle Festival in June I have been exploring knitting with plastic bags.

Following on from the Festival, I was asked to do a talk about knitting to a local ladies circle in early August.

I had to talk for an hour - normally I don't have a problem with this but was a bit worried about being sensible about knitting for a whole 60 minutes. I thought if I did a practical demonstration and gave them some ideas on how to knit with recycled materials that would go quite well.

As I guessed, many of them were senior citizens and quite a few of them could knit already (and were probably much better at it than me!). So that was quite a good plan.

I dismantled a couple of videotapes and also 2 audiotapes and made a small bag from some Patons Splash I had left and the video tape.


I think they thought I was a bit barmy but some of them had a go, I gave away some yarn (one of them was making Easter chicks) plus they paid me a tenner! At least it was a memorable talk...

And I bought 2 jars of homemade jam.

Since then, I have finished another bag made from plastic bags which I have donated to my good friend Linda to show to her friend Pam who runs a health food shop in Manchester.











I said I would sell them for £10 each but I was a bit drunk at the time and they do take quite a long time to complete.
Plus knitting with plastic strips is hard on the old hands.

I am now knitting with yarn again - what a relief!
















3 comments:

affectioknit2 said...

That's pretty neat - I'd like to make some recycled shopping bags like that - how do you cut your strips?

Thanks,

Teresa

YowlYY said...

That's brilliant, Sarah :)
I have thought of knitting some shoppers with plastic bags (I must have some hundreds stored in the garage), but I have so much yarn to work on right now...hmmm...maybe next year!

veganknitter said...

I did cut them up quite roughly unto strips 2cm wide and then knotted them together but then I found some better instructions in Simply Knitting magazine (I think).

I will reproduce them in my next blog post so everyone will havew them then.