Here are a few Christmas ornaments I made from old recycled Christmas cards. I save Christmas cards and those sample cards you get in the mail. I cut out to shapes and glue them together. You can either make them bigger for decorating on a tree or package. You can also make smaller ones that can be used as gift tags.
For more details on the process you can read my original craft post on Recycling Christmas Cards into Ornaments.
Here is one before picture shown below
I received a nice email from Anne asking about making plarn (plastic bag yarn) from some old tablecloths she had. She asked “Have you ever used any of the fairly inexpensive plastic banquet length table covers to make plarn?” And if so how do you do it? Well I replied to Anne at the email she left but it came back undeliverable so I thought I’d take this opportunity and respond in a post explaining the process.
Yes you can recycled those inexpensive plastic tablecloths into plarn. If the plastic is very thin, I would cut them about 1 to 1-1/2 inches wide depending on the thickness of plarn you desire. You want to cut the plastic in one long continuous strand as I did when I recycled some large plastic wedding gift bags.
The wedding gift bag plastic was very heavy so I cut it thinner but use your judgement depending on what you what to do with your recycled plastic yarn. I made a simple diagram below to show how you start cutting and just go around and around the plastic tablecloth to create one long strand. Should the plastic strand break, just tie a knot to join two strands. Roll the knot between your thumb and finger
I crocheted this baby blue vest for a co-worker’s daughter who is expecting a baby boy in a few months.
This baby vest is a newborn size and I used my free baby sweater vest crochet pattern. This is an easy and quick little pattern that takes less than 4 ounces of yarn to crochet.
Here are ten more mini Christmas stockings that I crocheted for the troops. These are my final contribution to the 2014 Warmth for Warriors Stocking Drive. The organization fills the stockings with goodies and are distributed as little Christmas gifts to the troops.
These socks were crocheted using Sucrette’s mini sock pattern. I only crocheted the pattern to 6 inches long so I adjusted the original pattern just a bit to make my stockings smaller.
I love to hear from people who are crocheting my patterns. I especially love seeing photos and thought I’d share this cute newborn baby sweater that Freya crocheted. She used my Ana sweater design and crocheted her’s using the free newborn sweater pattern for the newborn baby size.
Should you want a bigger sized sweater, here is the original Ana sweater pattern which fits a child 2-3 years old.
The Ana sweater is an easy pattern and the only issue people have found is on the up and down stitch count on the pattern. I’m always here to help should anyone have questions as you crochet this baby sweater.
We are having a CAL (crochet-a-long) over in our Trash to Treasures group on Ravelry. We are crocheting kitchen towel holders.
Here is the plastic ring holder I recycled to use in this crafting project. This plastic holder is used in retail stores to hold together two hot sauce jars. I thought it would be a good ring to use for the base of my towel holder. Here is how I recycled the plastic holder.
Cut the rings apart with sharp scissors and trim the edges so they look like these below. The rings are 3 inches wide and make an excellent base for the towel holder pattern.
Crochet around the plastic ring using two strands of yarn held together. I generally did 3 single crochets in between each plastic flange on the ring. This provides a nice even coverage over the recycled plastic ring.
Now just follow the towel ring holder pattern that Delights created to finish off the holder.
Here are a few more towel holders I crocheted
Here are some ribbed band hats I crocheted in several shades of yarn in child sizes. Here is a pretty colorful wool hat I crocheted with a ribbed band. I used my ribbed band hat pattern but only worked even on 58 stitches as of round 5 for a child’s size with a 5 mm (H) crochet hook. This resulted in a finished size of 17 inch Cir at band edge and 8 inches long that fit a 2 year old girl just fine.
Here is a closeup of the ribbing on the hat band with full pattern details below.
I have been crocheting chain stitch scarves lately and came up with this stitch variation. On my chain stitch scarves, I change yarn colors every other row and just carry the yarn at the end of that row. I drop and pick up the new color after I crochet two rows.
On the first row of the new color, I do a single crochet spike stitch or long crochet stitch down into the first row of the prior new color. By working this long single crochet stitch, it creates a unique V stitch look to the scarf. Here is a closeup of one scarf I crocheted using the stitch design.
Here is a pink and white youth sized scarf I crocheted using the same chain stitch design. For the youth size, I crocheted a starting chain of 5 feet.
Spike Chain Stitch Scarf Pattern
H (5 mm) crochet hook
3 – 4 ozs Medium weight yarn in 2 colors for total of 7-8 ozs for adult length scarf
USA Crochet terms used in pattern
Row 1
Chain 7+ feet to start scarf. Don’t worry about stitch count as you can always just unravel any unused stitches of the base row you don’t need.
Row 2
SC in 2nd chain from hook and SC in the next stitch also.
If you are looking for free plarn patterns or craft ideas for using recycled plastic bags, you are at the right website. I have over a hundred free plarn patterns at My Recycled Bags.com. When I started this blog site back in 2007, I had just one crochet pattern for using recycled plastic bags made into plarn. Over the last 7 years I have created and added over a hundred new plarn patterns which I offer free to everyone for their personal use.
In case you are new to recycled crafting, plarn is the term which refers to the material one can make by cutting plastic bags into strips. Thus the term is PL (plastic) + ARN (yarn) = PLARN.
I want to provide everyone with a comprehensive post here and provide everyone links on how to make plarn to all the different designs I have available in my pattern links.
First if you want to know how to make plarn from regular plastic retail bags, here is my picture tutorial on how to make plarn. Maybe you have the thin newspaper bags and wonder how to make plarn from those. Here is my newspaper bag plarn making tutorial.
Finally here is the link to all my free plarn patterns. I have everything from purses, totes, draft dodgers, baskets, scrubbies, slippers, rugs, clothes pin bags to hats.
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