Recycling and Stash Baskets

A long pause in blogging means there have been a ton of finished objects in the last couple of weeks - months in fact. That is another post, however. First I want to talk about what became of my mountain of plastic bags. And if I ever had had all the bags that went into this project in their original state, they would probably actually have made quite an impressive pile.
I first read about plarn on Ravelry (surprise!) and thought the idea was rather interesting and unlike a lot of other interesting ideas quite easily replicated. There are quite a number of tutorials that explain how to make yarn from plastic bags, I picked this one and off I went.
The first thing I learned is that knitting plarn is hard! So hard in fact that I chose to crochet it instead. Even then, it really hurt the hands after a while. Plastic likes to stick to the hooks. So I did what any creative knitter would do and lubed my hook with vaseline. That's a totally normal train of thought, right? Right? I still broke three of them, the first and most sadly missed was one my grandmother gave to me a while back with a very sizeable donation of her scrap yarns. It wasn't an object of dear memory, but still... bugger. It was notable the only one where the handly just broke off, with the new ones the hook and handle just fell apart, and very easily so.

Anyway, after hours of cutting and knotting and crocheting and begging strangers on the internet for more bags, here we are:

This is the nicer side when I still had bags of varying lovely colors.

This is the still reasonably nice side where I grabbed whatever bag I could get.

The box now holds a fair amount of my grandmother's yarn. It's mostly acrylic or acrylic blends with some cotton and the occasional sock yarn scrap. I love it, some of it is really soft. I've had several ideas as to what to do with it, but the different weights make it difficult to use it all in one big project.
I'm admittedly not a very accomplished crocheter, but I did feel it was well within my scope to knit two very basic rectangles. Apparently not:

I should say that this is not just a difference in plarn thickness or that I had to switch hooks so often. There actually where at least 10 more stitches at the end of my work. It's ok though, the rim got folded and then ironed to flatten it a bit. I just turn the crooked side towards the wall.I'll leave you with a close-up, because I've got a theory that all kinds of craft displays are immediately improved with a nice close shot.