On previous pages, we've looked at French knitting and use of plastic bag yarn. This page is more of the same, with just a couple of important differences:
- I'm only going to use bags that are at end-of-life - that is, bags that would normally be thrown away at this point.
- I want to make something really quite sturdy durable and useful this time - a basket.
The Raw Materials
For this project, I'm using soft polythene bags - mostly from loaves of sliced bread, but also including some that contained fruit, fresh or frozen vegetables, items of clothing, etc.
They come in a fantastic range of colours, so that should make the finished item quite appealing. I will confess that since starting this project, I have been buying a greater diversity of loaves than usual, just because the wrappers were pretty.
Making the yarn is as detailed on the previous page - roll the bag up, cut into strips and join with cow hitches, then roll up into a ball.
Rather than using a whole bag at a time, as in the last project, this time, I've mixed up the cut bag pieces and joined them in a very mixed, random fashion, to provide a different effect.
Construction of my basket will be a two-stage process. First, I will knit up the yarn on my six-peg French knitting bobbin, to form a tough rope.
When I have a sufficient quantity of rope, I will stitch it together in a flat coil to make the base of the basket, then form the sides by a similar coil process - just like making a clay coil pot.
The material knits up into a fairly uniform, hollow and highly flexible cord about one and half centimetres in diameter.
My intentional mixing of the different pieces of bag has paid off - it looks nice.
Each bread bag produces about 15 to 20cm of knitted rope.
It's pretty laborious work, however, after a little practice, I'm able to knit without looking, so I can do it while watching something on TV. I have already completed two quite large sections of rope, with a third in progress (awaiting more materials).
January 2009 - Construction Of The Basket
I've been working in spare moments during the holiday break and I now have four coils of knitted rope. Something like 10 metres of it in total.
On the next page, I'll describe the process of constructing the basket...
