How To Make A Sleeping Mat Out Of Plastic Bags

Cast on 72 stitches.

How to make a sleeping mat out of plastic bags.

Start by folding your plastic bag in half vertically. In this video i demonstrate how to make a sleeping mat with recyclable grocery bags. Materials to make a sleep mat from plastic bags. Plastic yarn can be used to crochet shopping bags very easily.

All you need is a pair of scissors crochet hook and chained grocery bag. The news reports always make it sound desperately exotic sleeping mats. The thicker the strips the thicker your mat. Note i put the sheets ink side down so that the ink didn t have a chance to transfer to any other surface.

Gauge 12 sts x 24 rows 4 10 cm in garter stitch. Then lay your sheets of plastic bag s over the back of the spiral. The basic instructions are above and can be modified to the desired size of bag. Do this two more times then cut off the top handles and the bottom seam to create a flat open plastic tube.

John the apostle catholic church to create their own mats using about 700 plastic bags apiece. Plastic bags 500 700 grocery bags. Basic knit sleep mat recipe. Meanwhile in norwalk iowa the mighty mat makers meet once a week at st.

So far they have spent at least 100 hours on the project producing 18 mats that have been handed out to the homeless and there are many more to come. Now take your strips and roll them together into a ball of plarn or plastic yarn. Make plarn using the above episode of ask me monday as a guide. The plastic bags will melt to the iron.

Approx 140 plastic bags or 1260 yds of plarn size us 11 8mm scissors. From here you cut these into strips. Here s one tutorial for making a plarn sleeping mat and here s another tutorial and if you re on ravelry here s another although you ll have to log in or create a free account to view it. Rather than throwing them out you can reuse them by crocheting them into multi purpose mats known as plarn plastic yarn.

First put the spiral pin side down on an iron safe surface. You are now ready to begin knitting or crocheting your plarn mat. Out of plastic bags but the truth is that it s totally do able.