Upcycled plastic yarn bag

All right, tonight we are doing a little upcycling. If your shopping bag holder is overflowing or you haven't been making it in to take the bags back into the recycling bin at the store, or if you're feeling guilty about stuffing them all into the garbage, this is the project for you. It is easy and fun and best of all, absolutely free (well, you might have to spend a dollar or two on a crochet hook).

You have to start by making the yarn. Lay your shopping bag out flat to start with, as shown above. Then cut off the top and bottom of the bag so that you have an open tube, like this:

You are ignoring my icky carpet and extraneous objects, right? OK, now fold the bag over almost in half, leaving a little tab on one side. Then keep folding the folded portion over until it's of a width you can easily cut with one swipe of your scissors. It will look about like this:

It might be hard to tell, but the top part of that photo has just two thicknesses of plastic (the front and back of the bag) while the bottom part has several thicknesses folded over.

Now cut through the folded part, leaving the thin tab on top uncut. This step was really hard to take a picture of, but I tried:

Your sections should be about an inch wide. Maybe slightly narrower. It's fairly forgiving as long as you're close. Too narrow and the yarn will break easily. Too wide and it will be too chunky to work with. But really, just eyeball it to about an inch and you'll be dandy. 

Once you've cut all your sections, spread out the bag so the uncut portion is opened like a book and the cut sections are spread out to the sides, like this:

All right, now the really tricky part to describe. You will want to work from bottom to top. Cut from the center of the uncut portion, diagonally from right to left up to the end of one section cut. This makes the end of your yarn. Then cut diagonally from the end of each right-hand section cut, upward to the end of the next left-hand section cut. 

Again, this was a pain in the rear to try to photograph. Here was my attempt:

Think of it as a parking garage. You created all the parking spaces first, and now you're just doing the ramps from level to level. 

Ultimately this will make one long  piece of plastic yarn that you can wind up into a cute little ball.

Then you can crochet it into a handy-dandy tote bag, like this:

I did this all in simple, single crochet. Obviously the stripes are from different shopping bags. But you could do a solid-colored one, too, of course. 

If you all are interested, I can do some simple crochet instructions. What do you think?