Weaving Bags from Plastic Newspaper Sleeves, Guest Post from Linda

Daily deliveries of newspapers and advertising circulars amount to a huge pile of plastic sleeves just for my household alone. Strolls through the neighborhood make me wonder just how many of those plastic sleeves lying in almost every lawn are being recycled. The plastic really is pretty--bright colors, soft and pliable, and a really nice size to this weaver's eye. Tada!!

Finished bag

I'd seen a few photos on Ravelry of shopping bags made from various materials, and newspaper sleeves seemed perfect. I used cotton rug warp as weft and put three yards on my little Wolf Pup LT. (Twelve ends per inch, 206 total ends, yielding 17" in the reed.) I split the bags down the sides lengthwise, which was fairly time consuming but gave me narrower stripes which should wear better.

Laying out bag strips by color

The prototype bag is tough, lightweight, and has been in use all summer by my youngest daughter for

everything from groceries to beach gear.

Prototype hanging on Wolf Pup loom

Such a good idea shouldn't be limited to one bag, so I put another, longer warp on a bigger loom.
Generous friends offered to save newspaper sleeves for me to speed up my inventory acquisition. It was great fun choosing the colors of carpet warp, and I certainly didn't limit my palette!

Cones for warp

My huge Oxaback warping mill made short work of measuring twelve yard ends in random stripes.

Oxaback decked out in striped warp

Warp chains ready to go

Beaming the warp and threading the heddles and reed took a few hours. I work slowly and meticulously, because a well-behaved warp is all important to the success of any project. Seeing the first few inches of weaving is so much fun--now I get to play with sparkly colors for hours!

Warp on loom before weaving starts

Weaving has started

The weaving is fairly quick, and the bag construction was surprisingly easy. I made my own pattern,  very similar to the Butterick B267. My Bernina 1130 handled the basic straight stitches without a hiccup. I used strapping from the local fabric store for handles and added a bit of that strapping to the top edge of the seams for reinforcement.

Bag interior

I wove a seam allowance from cotton and stitched it down so that the inside seam would be covered.

Finished interior seam

Red straps-prototype, green straps, improved construction

These are the first finished bags. I have a 12 yard warp on for another 8 or 9 bags, but only enough plastic for about half of them. It's time to collect more plastic sleeves!