From Recycled Grocery Bags to Crocheted Decorative Basket

Recycle, Reuse and Repurpose is my motto. Being inclined to arts and crafts, I am always on the lookout for creative ways to follow my heart. This project is one such attempt to crochet a small, beautiful basket that can be used to keep your jewelry, fruits, keys of any such small items that's hard to find. I just want to add a note here that this project is not a for a novice or a beginner's tutorial in crocheting. Someone with intermediate knowledge of crocheting and hands-on will be able to work this project.

If you are adept with crocheting, you will definitely find this useful and interesting to work on. Be prepared with the challenges that lie ahead.

Grab a cup of coffee and join me to explore more!

1. Reusable thin and flexible plastic bags

2. Crocheting needles

3. Scissors

In this project, I was not looking for a strong or a great quality of plastic bags. This groceries bags will be good enough. I gathered a few of these bags and laid these flat on a table. Then, I cut these along the length with 1 inches width. Collected all of these together to make sure they are of the same length and nearly same width. Refer pic 2.

Well, I have been crocheting for a while and have made some really beautiful projects. As I've always wanted to try my hands on plastic bags, but have never tried these before, I was a little nervous. In the pics 1 & 2, I have tested to check if these strips are good enough for this project? It worked well.

Now that I was confident that I would be able to crocket with these trips as yarn, I decided to keep progressing. The next hurdle was how do I join these small strips into one big strip. Initially I thought of adding some glue to these plastics. But I didn't think that was a very efficient way to deal with these strips. I thought a little more intelligent on this and finally put one strip on the first one and rolled it up to mimic a full-length yarn. Well, I was successful. My intelligent trick worked :-) The actual challenge was that the thickness at the joins is slightly more than that of the regular plastic. However, that's not such a big deal. Its perfectly alright as I was trying best of the waste.

I started with 6 chains and then joint back to completed the first ring. Then, I worked on 15 slip stitches (sl st) for the circle adjusting and adapting to the joins and thickness of the plastic as and when needed. Next, as the diameter increased, the slip stitches were now 22 (sl st). By now I had completed two circles. In the next circle, I went to make double crochet (dc) stitches. Then, the next circle has 36 double crochet (dc) stitches. Every time, I made sure to keep adding the plastic strips as yarn and keep the motion and motivation :-). Refer pics 3 & 4.

Now the decorative bowl base is complete as seen in pic 5. The finish is not as great as a regular full length and equal thickness yarn, but its not too bad either. Do you agree?

As I wanted to have a side wall/edge for this basket. I continued with 36 double crochet stitches (dc) on the vertical side. Refer image 1. Then I added another circle to this. At this stage the basket is ready. Then, I wished to add two holding hooks. Although in this project it's not of much use, it looks cool. Then, I crocheted 10 chains and hooked it on the other end. Added a second chain over the first one on the first hook as the base. Repeated these steps again on the other side nearly diagonally opposite. The basket is now ready. With some light prints on the grocery bags,

This being my first time to work on this creative idea, I planned to keep it small and simple. As I was looking for a basked to put my jewelry or such small items.

Congratulations if you able to stay with me. Thank you! Try to Recycle, Reuse and Repurpose.