Plastic packaging | Tape | Wire | Plastic bag string

I had been saving plastic bags from porridge oats and rice for some time because they have good colours. I played with making loops and there were ways to make better designs in the loops, but in this case I wanted to utilise the whole bag and so I cut each in half – yielding 2 loops each – and the packaging has dictated the patterns.

There were two main type of plastic and I folded each loop by eye, lining up the print. The rice bags (orange and pink) were a loud crinkly plastic that split easily. I stuck many of these back together with sellotape. One of the orange baskets is the top half and the other the bottom half.

The other plastic was softer and easier to work with. I didn’t have so many of these so the base of the basket was one side of the packet and the rim the other – meaning I have some loops left over.

They all have a wire woven in. I wasn’t sure if this was necessary at first – but here is the difference – with wire and without wire:

I was keen to try the plastic bag string that my daughter showed me in her knitted dragon project. It’s an extra step that I’ve not felt the need to do in this weave before but in this and it worked really well and made a big difference to the overall strength and appearance of the baskets by pulling together the slippery plastic.

I found the seams of these bags, especially the rice bags to be unworkable on the whole as they were melted into uneven shapes. So this design isn’t a zero waste one, but I think it is a good reuse. The good news is that our local porridge now come in paper bags so I now have that to collect and try weaving with. The bad news is that all my baskets are already full of scraps from other projects – it doesn’t take long!