Making Mats For Homeless Out Of Plastic Bags

Taking something that will forever sit in a landfill and repurposing it in such a creative way.

Making mats for homeless out of plastic bags.

Opting to use green canvas bags for your grocery shopping is an effective option but many people still have excess plastic bags lying about the place. Meanwhile in norwalk iowa the mighty mat makers meet once a week at st. I read an article where people are making rectangular mats out of plastic bags as well to be used by the homeless for sleep mats during the wet season. The may 2016 auxiliary magazine featured a follow up to its cucumel s compassionate carpets article it published a few months.

Regardless of who uses it it s a great way to recycle. Flatten out bags tucking in pleats 2 carefully stack 6 bags use clothes pins to keep them aligned until ready to cut. Each mat takes about 50 hours to make. How these women crochet sleeping mats for homeless people out of plastic bags why we wrote this usually plastic bags are solely utilitarian and more and more they re maligned.

Rather than throwing them out you can reuse them by crocheting them into multi purpose mats known as plarn plastic yarn. I am amazed by the creativity of people. I am going to try this. Using a quilting ruler or other straight edge that is wider than the bags first trim the bottom seam off the bags then cut strips approximately 1 2 inch 1 cm wide across the width of the stacked bags forming loops.

After a month of crocheting interspersed with stopping to cut bags into thin strips. A word of forewarning when putting out the call to action for collecting plastic bags be prepared for an avalanche of plastic bags. So when i considered making mats for the homeless out of plastic bags and saw that crocheting was the method most widely used to achieve that goal here in america that is where i started. Gather the plastic bags.

In particular plarn can be used as sleeping mats for people. Each 6 foot by 2 foot mat is made from 600 to 700 recycled plastic grocery bags. These sleeping mats make great supplies for the homeless population allowing them to sleep comfortably wherever they need to. This is a great way to involve your local church group knitting or crochet group youth group or scout organization with collecting and sorting the bags.

The bag ladies as they call themselves also specialize in making large tote bags out of the plastic. It also makes a great addition to any camping trip. This is a demo video showing you how to take plastic shopping bags and converting them into sleeping mats for the less fortunate.