Absolutely Irrelevant

Ok, so like I said: This won't be all poetry and writing and reading all the time. In fact, today's post has literally nothing to do with any of those topics. But as the writer of this blog, I get to do arbitrary things like this. Well, since the point of the website is also to encourage creativity in its many forms, I guess this isn't actually, totally off brand. Still! Not important. Today, I'm going to be sharing a recent creative project with you.

Have you heard of plarn?

I hadn't until last week, but I was instantly intrigued. You see, plarn is just "plastic yarn" all squished into a new term. And when I learned both what it is and how to make it, I just had to give it a try. If you follow me over on instagram, you may have seen a story with this picture:

That's because plarn can be made out of something you probably have a lot of around your house. (You DEFINITELY do if you're Asian/Polynesian!) That's right: Plastic bags. And, of course, due to the pandemic and quarantine, et cetera, we had more than usual. So I gathered all the brownish bags and got snipping.

See, here's the thing. I'm big on reducing waste, reusing materials, and recycling where I can. I like to cut down on plastic and paper waste within our household, and I may have shown my daughter too many documentaries and scarred her for life. That's not to say I'm zero waste by any means, or even all that good at sticking to and enforcing my own reduction methods, but I'm human and I'm trying. So, yes, all the plastic bags get saved. And I like trying to find ways to use anything that comes into our house (and subsequently gets emptied), making this seem like an excellent project.

Having cut up a rather small amount, it still ended up looking like I had quite a bit to work with, so I started using the loops of plastic to create the "yarn" for a ball.

Each strip got tied onto the next until quite a long chain was formed. From there I repeated the process on I'm-not-even-sure-how-many bags. This went on over a couple days, just whenever I had the chance to sit down and devote some time and space to the effort. Eventually I had what I would guess is about the same amount as your average ball of yarn. It was great. I was feeling accomplished. There were so many possibilities. Actually, I wasn't entirely sure what those possibilities were, so I decided to get in touch with my best friend - Pinterest.

Ends up, there are nearly endless projects to do with plarn. However, most of them take an awful lot of the material. No matter! I decided to start small. I wanted to make a little planter thing for succulents. I got my knitting needles out without a specific pattern for a guide and just went with it. It went. Terribly. Now, I've been knitting since I was ten, but I wouldn't say that I'm great at it. I have a couple of things I can do competently, and I usually try to stay within those bounds. Or prepare to try many iterations of the same thing until it is added to the list of proficient projects. And maybe it's just me, but I don't think that plarn is a very knit-able material. At all. So I figured I'd try my hand at crocheting.

Side note: I have not been crocheting long. In fact, I have crocheted two things ever and only learned how by watching one minute of one YouTube video one time. I quit after I thought I caught the gist of it and - again - supposed that I could wing it. Surprisingly, it went much better than expected. Not fabulous, but better than the knitting anyway. So here's how it went:

My sister (who manages to not kill every plant she's entrusted with) has a love of succulents, so she's getting three little plarn planter/pot things. And I will be making more plarn and trying to improve my crocheting capabilities. Still, all in all, this went ok and I'm decently pleased with the outcome. Creativity never rests and there is always a learning curve, but I hope whoever's reading this feels inspired to try something new!