It took me many hours to complete this and I have some interesting new calluses on my fingers, but here it is - approximately 10 metres of knitted plastic rope, made from old bags.

I'm going to stitch the basket together with - you guessed it - more plastic bag yarn - this time, made from a very tough carrier bag I got from a shoe shop. I could use bread bags here again, but I think it deserves something stronger.

I attached a single loop of the yarn to a large darning needle by passing one end through the eye, then putting the needle's point back through it. This can easily be undone in order to attach the next length when required.

Having roughly worked out a plan of action, I sewed the ropes to themselves in a spiral coil pattern (more on that in a moment)

It was only necessary to pass the needle under one stitch on the edge of each section of rope - as illustrated - and skipping one or two rows along each time.

I decided to make an oblong bag-type basket, so I formed the base by creating an elongated spiral around a single straight length of rope.

After the base was completed, I started building the same coil up the sides - easy enough to do just by holding the rope in place to work out how it should join onto the previous coil.

The basket more or less formed itself. Again, this is hard work, but it looks like the end result is going to be quite interesting.

Then the main body of the bag was finished - it turns out that 10 metres of rope is just about enough. However, I needed to make a little more for the handles, and once again, I was out of bags.

This time, I got a couple of friends and relatives to save their empty bread bags for me...

To make the handles, I knitted up a couple of sections of rope, each about a metre long, then folded them double and stitched them in that position.

Then I attached them to the sides of the bag, stitching right through the full thickness of the handle and bag sidewall, fixing them to the top six rows of the bag, to help distribute the load a bit.