Craft Day

Yesterday I had a full day of crafts. I joined the knitting group at 10:30 am who were all working on their individual projects; there were 12 ladies around the table. There was a wonderful woman named Gretchen who is a certified master knitter who walked around the table helping each person with their problems. It was an excellent chance to ask all those nagging knitting questions. Most of the ladies were pretty new to knitting like me, with two gals just learning how. One lady was beaming with pride as she just learned how to purl that morning!

After lunch I went to the crocheting group of about 10 ladies. These ladies are very ingenious recycling plastic bags and old tee shirts. Those plastic bags are becoming wine bottle holders, purses, and shopping bags. The tee shirts are cut into strips and crocheted into rugs. This group is certainly doing their part in recycling.

Many of you know Jim and I use purchased store bags to use for shopping and try not to use plastic bags. I give whatever plastic bags we do get to owners of big dogs for obvious reasons. So I only had 4-5 bags to cut up in a cleaver way. You fold up the bag, cut off the handle and bottoms ends, leave free the side fold and cut into the piled up folds at 1.5 inch intervals. Then when you open it up you can off-set cut the strips into one long strip about 10-12 yards long - much like quilters make bias binding for quilt edges. I was really surprised you could get 12 yards of strips from one Walmart plastic bag. It takes 15 bags to make a medium size shopping bag so I may have to get a few more bags!

Being a fulltime rver really is an advantage to crocheting these recycled bags as we go to different cities and areas of the country, so we can find different colored bags at different stores. It is a real prize to find colored plastic bags to add an edging for detail to a shopping bag, since most of what we find are white bags with colored printing on them. Oh, well, another thing to start saving.

Remember - you are loved!