Pearly Crocheted Mesh Bag

Another plarn bag. Yeah, I love to crochet with this stuff.

It's from this pattern on Ravelry. I kind of wish I had used a larger hook (I used the one the pattern called for) since the single crochets at the top and bottom are a bit stiff. The mesh section is also a little tight on certain rows.

The plarn is from big transluscent bags that come in cases of t-shirts my parents get for their screenprinting business. They're a little harder to work with than regular sized bags, since you have to fold them more times, and it's harder to keep the strands from knotting up. I really like the color of the finished product though, so it's worth the fight. The little black flowers are from some trash bags that I had used to cover my backpack in the back of the truck on the way to the camp.

In the picture it looks like the bottom is wider than the top, but in reality it's not. It's just the way the picture took.

New Grocery/Garden Bag

So I really like this pattern. It's the Market Bag pattern at Lion Brand Yarn's website. It's for their cotton yarn, but I did it with plastic bags. Because of this switch, I also used a "J" hook instead of the "H" they call for in the pattern.

Normally, I use softer/more pliable plarn (plastic yarn). It's easier to use the kind that WalMart bags are made of, mainly because they're almost all made of the same weight of material. This bag, though, is made from all those other plastic bags you get, such as: bread, carrots, toilet paper, paper towels, red beans, celery, tortillas, dry cleaner bags and many, many others.

This makes for a much slower construction. It also yields a slightly lumpier finished product. Over time I think it will smooth out some. The bottom flattened out a good bit after just the first use.

The bag is rather large. It's 14" wide at the bottom and about 19" tall (including the handle). It has a little stretch, but not much. Unlike other reusable shopping bags, it doesn't fold up really small or anything. He's a very sturdy little fellow though, and I like his colors.

My photography skills leave something to be desired...ah well. I'll get better one day. :)

Crocheted Plarn Tote with Lining

I had posted a partially completed tote I was working on over the summer, and I finally finished it just before school started again. Can you tell I've been busy and not posting on here? :P

The pattern I used came from Interweave Crochet magazine and was for regular yarn, IIRC. Being the ever broke college student, I bypassed the monetary expenditure and used plarn. When it was done I decided it would be my school bag this year, but I was afraid of stretching issues. To avoid that, I lined it with part of an old blue (black, really) jean shirt.

Here's the original.

And here's mine. I did the big bag, if you can't tell.

The white bags are the fully white portions of WalMart, ThankYouThankYouThankYou bags, and Raising Cane's bags for the most part. There are a few others in there probably, but that's where most of the all white comes from.

The brown bags are from Home Depot, Piggly Wiggly, Albertsons, brown ThankYouThankYouThankYou bags, Super 1 and a few other places that I can't remember right now. UPDATE! I remembered some others: Toys R Us, old Rouses bags and Ace hardware.

I really like the tweed kind of look the brown has with all the little snippets of other colors. The plain white balances that out.

Very slowly, I'm working on making my mom her own like this. She wants grey and pink with maybe some black or white on it too. The pink comes from Body Shop, and the grey is Lowes, Auto Zone and sometimes Dollar Tree. Hers will probably be lined with an old button up shirt I have that's a nice heavy black material.

Scrap Afghan and Plarn Purse (in progress)

I came across the coolest (to me, anyways) scrapghan on Ravelry about a year ago. It's a yo yo afghan. Use up a ton of tiny scraps too small for granny squares, make a blanket that doesn't have holes big enough for toes to poke through and ta-dah! Beautiful afghan. I'm kind of slow. I've only worked on it when I got a few spare minutes or in the truck between Louisiana and Oklahoma (we're in Oklahoma right now). So it's not too huge yet. I've got the yo yo's made, now it's just to put them together. Here's a work in progress picture of it. I like it, nice and warm for the little it is so far. I wasn't sure how much I was going to like it after I started looking at the yo yo's with all the colors touching. With the beige yarn connecting, though, it looks kind of stained glassy.

My other current work in progress (OK, one of my other) is something I got out of Interweave Crochet a year or so ago. I started it last Christmas while sitting in a deer stand because as much as I love hunting, I get bored easily. It's plain white plarn and brown variegated plarn. The white comes off of mostly WalMart or other such bags, the brown is from my aunt's Toys R Us shopping, Home Depot, Piggly Wiggly, and Albertsons for the most part. Some come from other stuff, some I've no clue where they're from.

The bottom of the bag is kind of funky right now. I think I may have messed up on the increases a bit, but once I put some stuff in it after it's done, the weight should rearrange it better/flatter. I've added a few more rows of the stair-steppy colors since this was taken. I like the brown and white together, it gives a nice tweed look.

This first one is with the picture in the magazine. You can kind of see the funky-ness of the bottom here.

And a closeup of the colors/pattern.

Hopefully this afternoon or tomorrow I'll get the stuff with black currants and mulberries up here. That's the other stuff I've been spending my time on. :)

Canning Beets, Grapefruit Juice, and Japan Plum/Kumquat ?'s...

So first off, we have a ton of fruit, etc trees/plants in our yard. Plum, pecan, grapefruit, orange, satsuma, tangerine, 2 kinds of kumquats, 3 or 4 kinds of figs, 2 kinds of persimmons, Japan plums (aka loquats), blackberries, 2 kinds of muscadines, you get the idea. For the most part, I can come up with multiple things to do with all these. I'm stumped on a few though. I love to eat Japan plums right off the tree, but there's got to be other stuff to do with them. I've looked online and come across a few recipes for cooking with them, and a good bit on jam/preserves. I even saw one with packing them in salt for 10 years before you eat them.

Has anyone ever tried these? Do you have any other/better suggestions? Can I just hot/raw pack them and put them in fruit salad? Run them through the dehydrator for a snack?

I have a similar question with kumquats. We have 2 kinds of these - one sweet, one sour. I don't eat them, but I do make kumquat/orange marmalade for my parents and brother to eat. I've dehydrated them once, and they made a crunchy snack my brother and dad liked. Got any other suggestions for canning? Think I could slice them up, hot/raw pack them and use them in fruit salad year round? I hate having food go to waste in the yard, but I'm stumped.

Now, to share what I actually did can a few weekends ago.

19 quarts of grapefruit juice. I don't drink it, I hate grapefruits, but my brother loves it. The tree is huge, and I barely touched it to get the 15-20 gallons of grapefruits we used.

I also did a batch of pickled beets that same weekend. I didn't have any fresh ones, so I used store bought canned stuff (sigh) but they work just as well. Santa brought a ton of the Tattler canning lids for the holidays this past year, so now I can stick them on just about everything I can this year. :)

And just cause my daddy took a picture of it for me to put up here: I present the rack of canned/dried food. It's not as packed as it was before Christmas, but it's getting filled up again. I didn't have room for the ~100 quarts of pears I hot packed last year on there, so they have floor space. The majority of the remaining junk on/near the floor is plarn (plastic yarn) that I crochet with, or the bags to make it with. Sigh...I need to clean house. ;)

Dehydrated Apples and Mixed Veggies

So we had some Red Delicious and Jonathan apples that were going kind of bad...solution? Dehydrate them! We have a lot of dehydrated slices already, so as these were softening I decided to make them into a powder for apple cinnamon oatmeal and the like. After tasting them in oatmeal, I have come to the conclusion that their flavor is not overly concentrated for something like that. You need a lot of apple to taste it in oatmeal.

Wash the apples, grab a knife, cutting board and one of those Pampered Chef choppy things (optional, I like it because it's my mom's and it's fun to play with).

Remove the cores, chop up into pieces small enough to go under the choppy thing. Chop up with that, dump in a pot and add enough water to cover.

Cook uncovered on medium heat until they're softened and most of the water is gone. Spread it on your jelly roll and stick it in the dehydrator until it's brittle.

Above is it wet, below is it dried and broken up to go in the food processor.

Powder it up, stick it in a jar (it's on the right side).

On the left is dried mixed veggies, previously frozen. They were $0.98 for a 1 pound bag at WalMart, so we got a few bags to do. When you rehydrate them for soup or something, they hold their shape and stay more firm than just using frozen or canned veggies in soup. These are really easy to do.

Open the bag. Dump contents on the dehydrator tray. Stick it in the machiene. Wash the bag. Cut it up for use in plarn (plastic yarn). Dry the veggies until they are brittle, stick them in a jar. Fill up a pint jar, and that's about the right amount for a large beef/veggie soup.

Shared with TALU.

Making Plarn/Plastic Yarn

(still working out taking pictures, kind of bad with cameras some days...)

About a year and a half or two years ago, I came across this stuff called plarn online. Basically, it's the use of plastic shopping bags to make yarn to crochet or knit with. I've seen a bit of knitted plarn, and haven't really liked the look of it. Being a novice at knitting, I haven't given it a shot yet. Having crocheted since about the third or fourth grade, I felt much better about playing with plarn in crocheting. Since I first learned about it, I've come a long way in my crocheting with it. This is my attempt at how to make a ball of plarn from bags.

First off, get clean bags. If they're dirty, either wash or throw them away and find some clean ones. Lay the first victim out flat on your work surface.

Next, fold it in half.

And again.

And one last time.

Now take your cutting utensil of choice and remove the bottom of the folded bag. This is the section seamed together. Just cut off as much as needed, no need to waste any, unless you do like me and cut too much off. 

Continue to cut up the bag into about one inch pieces. If they're a bit bigger, it's ok, same for being on the small side. Dispose of the handle at the top.

I used a rotary cutter today since I was sitting at the dining table and had room for the mat and wanted a change up from scissors. But my usual weapon is the scissors. I use a pair of those titanium blade ones the late craft center at WalMart had. The better your blades, the easier time you will have.This is with the scissors. Same process.

Right now I'm making a big batch of varigated colors all with white background. This is what I had cut up for colors so far this morning. The box of white next to it is going into balls of white yarn and came from the un-inked sections of bags cut for varigated.

To put your yarn together, take 2 pieces of bag. Pull them open and place bag A (strip farther to the right) over top of one half of bag B (strip on left).

Pull the right tip of bag A up through the right tip of bag B.

Pull them together firmly to make a small knot. Don't pull too hard or else it will begin to tear the bags. However, the smaller the knot you have the less it will show up in your stitches.

Ball it up, bind with a rubber band and cut up some more!

I don't just use grocery/shopping bags. I go for pretty much any kind of plastic bag that comes through my house that I can repurpose to keep it from going in the trash. These bags here are all from bread, toilet paper in big packs, carrots and the like. They are a bit harder to crochet with, but I like the look of them as well.

When crocheted, they come out looking like this:

Crocheted Plarn Bag

A while back I made this bag with plastic shopping bags and vhs tapes. The bags I used to get this pearly color were a kind of transluscent white. When you cut the bags for the plarn and start crocheting though, it comes out nice and opaque with that pearl-like sheen. The black edging came from old vhs tapes. I just used the tape straight off the reel, no doubling over or carrying another yarn with it. Warning: The tape is harder to do than the regular plarn. It also kind of has a squeaky noise if you use a metal hook that can get on your nerves after a while.

The pattern came from an old issue of Crochet magazine, can't remember which one. The original pattern, when done with cotton yarn, has a lot more give and stretches a bit. With the plarn, I used the same G hook that the pattern called for, so it doesn't have the same kind of stretch just by the nature of the materials. When you're using plarn, especially on the smaller hooks, be careful and take breaks. It is more strenuous on the hands than normal yarn.