The drawer. Everybody has the drawer, and it is full of plastic grocery bags nobody can throw away and nobody can use. Here is what they actually turn into. Cut a bag into a continuous 1.5 inch strip and you have plarn, which crochets on an N hook exactly like chunky yarn and is waterproof, so it becomes a market tote, a pair of sandals, placemats that wipe clean. Iron six bags between parchment on the nylon setting and they fuse into a sheet you can sew, which is where the lined snack bag and the coasters come from. Thread strips through a mesh basket and you have a pendant light. These 25 DIY ideas with plastic bags cost nothing but the bags, and most of them are the kind of thing you finish in an afternoon.
1. Tablecloth Plarn
Start here, because half the list needs plarn before it needs anything else. The trick on this one is the material: a cheap party store plastic tablecloth instead of grocery bags, which gives you one huge unbroken sheet in a real color rather than a pile of white bags with store logos on them. Fold it widthwise several times, then cut 1.5 inch strips with a rotary cutter. Join strips by overlapping two ends about three inches, folding the overlap and cutting a slit at least an inch from each end, then threading each end through the other’s hole and pulling tight. No knots, no bulk. One tablecloth gives you a startling amount of yarn.
Get the full tutorial at Persia Lou.
2. Plastic Bag Planter Cover
A crocheted sleeve that slips over a 4 inch nursery pot, worked as a plain cylinder with no increases after the base so it holds its shape, then finished with two long ears, closed eyes and a pink nose. The maker specifies a stiff yarn on purpose, because a soft one lets the ears flop over and the whole joke collapses. Skip the handle and it is a planter cover; add one and it is a small Easter basket. The written pattern with stitch counts is a paid download, but the photo tutorial on the page walks the shape clearly enough to follow.
Get the full tutorial at The Inspired Wren.
3. Basket Out of Plastic Bags
Cut the handles off, cut the bags into 2 inch strips, tie them end to end and braid the whole lot into one long rope, then coil the rope from the base up and hot glue each round to the one below it. That is the entire method, which is why it is the one to hand a teenager who says they are bored. The white with red and blue confetti flecks in the photo is just supermarket printing chopped small. No hook, no pattern, no counting, and the finished bin is stiff enough to stand up on its own and wipe out with a cloth.
Get the full tutorial at DIY Joy.
4. Crocheted Plastic Bag Doily Clock
A round doily crocheted in butter yellow plarn with a cream scalloped border, stiffened enough to hang flat, with a clock movement pushed through the center hole and plain black hands on the front. The scale is the nice part: worked in plarn instead of thread, a doily pattern that would normally make a coaster comes out big enough to read from across the room. Grocery bags in a single color are hard to come by, so the yellow here is almost certainly a colored tablecloth or produce bags sorted by shade.
Get the full tutorial at Creative Jewish Mom.
5. Recycled Plastic Bag Pendant Light
Two metal mesh baskets, the deep fryer or sieve kind with big holes, wired together rim to rim into a sphere, with plastic bag strips roughly 1 inch by 3 inches threaded through every hole until the whole thing is shaggy. Heavier bags hold their shape better than flimsy drugstore ones, and white bags with black printing give you that flicker of text in the glow. The safety note matters: plastic melts, so run a low wattage bulb or an LED, never anything that gets hot. Stop after one basket and you have a wall sconce instead.
Get the full tutorial at Allison Patrick, The 3 R's Blog.
6. Recycled Plastic Bag Braided Bracelet
This one uses a clear newspaper delivery bag, not a grocery bag, which is what makes it look like glass rather than rubbish. Tape the bag down, cut it to length, then cut three evenly spaced slits up it and stop an inch short of the closed edge so it stays in one piece. That gives six strands in two layers. Tape a length of colored satin cord to each section, braid over and under keeping even tension, tape the ends and join. Fifteen inches for a small wrist, sixteen for a medium, seventeen and a half for a large. The cord is where all the color comes from.
Get the full tutorial at Make It Easy Crafts.
7. Recycled Wreath From Plastic Grocery Bags
Hundreds of small squares of tan plastic, scrunched and packed onto a ring until the surface is all ruffle and no gaps, hung on a white door. The color is doing the heavy lifting here, since a wreath built from white bags reads as packaging and one built from paper bag brown reads as fall, and it is the same technique either way. This is the classic tie or poke method for wreaths, done with plastic instead of tulle, which means it lives on an exposed front door through a rainy autumn without drooping.
Get the full tutorial at Queen of the Household.
8. How to Paint Flowers With a Plastic Bag
Here is the trick, and it is a good one: knot a plastic bag, turn it inside out, blow it up and knot it again, and the taut rounded surface becomes a stamp that prints a flower head in one press. Hold the balloon flat, brush acrylic onto it from the center outward in petal strokes, then press it straight onto paper while the paint is wet. A cotton swab dots a contrasting center, and stems and leaves go on with a brush or with a second, smaller bag. Vary the size and the shade between presses and you get depth without knowing how to paint.
Get the full tutorial at DIY Joy.
9. Plastic Bag Beads
Bags cut into strips, rolled tight around a skewer and heat set into hard little barrels that thread onto cord like any other bead, shown in the photo mid roll with the strip still trailing. The beads come out streaked and stony looking, closer to slate than to plastic, because the printing on the bag smears as it melts. Good with children for the rolling part, less good for the heat part. String them long, or alternate them with wooden beads so the color reads as deliberate rather than as whatever was in the drawer.
Get the full tutorial at DIY Joy.
10. Crocheted Tote Plastic Bags
Two totes worked in plarn, one navy with a white and blue striped band around the base and one white flecked with print and banded in gray, both with the handles crocheted straight into the body rather than sewn on afterward, which is the joint that fails first on a bag that carries groceries. The pattern is a reader’s, Melita Poley-Ruston’s, and it gives both bags in full. Plarn is stiffer than yarn, so a tote in it stands up by itself on the floor of the car instead of slumping, and it takes a wet lettuce without complaint.
Get the full tutorial at Canadian Living.
11. Reusable Lined Snack Baggie
The fusing part is the skill, and it takes twenty minutes: flatten six grocery bags, cut off the bottoms and handles, stack them between parchment paper and iron on the nylon setting, moving constantly, adding one layer at a time until the sheet feels right. Then trim the fused plastic to 7 by 15 inches, cut fabric to match, sew almost all the way around leaving a 3 inch gap, turn it through and fold the rectangle so one end becomes a flap. Ventilate the room while you melt anything, start cooler than you think, and hand wash it afterward.
Get the full tutorial at Happy Hour Projects.
12. Plastic Bag Kite
Four steps, and you can do it in a car park. Cut the bag open along the side seam, then cut an elongated diamond out of the flat sheet. Lay two thin dowels across it in a T, tape them down and trim the ends flush. Tape three streaming tails to the underside, each one as long as the kite itself, since that is what stops it spinning. Then tape a small triangle of plastic to the front as a harness, thread fishing line through it, and go. The whole thing weighs nothing, which is exactly why it flies in a breeze that grounds a shop bought kite.
Get the full tutorial at Whole Living.
13. Crochet Fun Placemats
A round plarn mat in cream flecked with red and blue, edged in a solid blue round, worked in the flat spiral you would use for a rag rug, photographed under a teapot on an outdoor table. Plarn is exactly right for outdoor table linen, because it does not soak up a spilled drink, it does not stain and it dries in about a minute in the sun. That solid blue edge is the whole design: one round of sorted single color bags at the end turns a scrappy mat into something that looks bought.
Get the full tutorial at Creative Jewish Mom.
14. Recycled Plastic Bag Sandals
Roughly forty bags cut into 1 inch strips gives you the one ball of plarn this takes, worked on a size J 6mm metal hook. The sole starts as a chain of 23 and grows in rounds of single crochet with increases at the curves, coming out around 10.25 inches long and 86 stitches at the end for a women’s 9 to 10. The opening runs about 5.5 inches down from the center toe on each side. Make them snug, because plarn stretches and a loose pair will slide off your heel on the first step. Fine as indoor slippers too.
Get the full tutorial at My Recycled Bags.
15. Coasters From Plastic Bags
These are fused, not crocheted, and they look nothing like the rest of the list: circles of ironed plastic sheet in pale blue, cream and rust, with gold flowers and swirls printed through them, laid out around a mug of coffee. The printing on the original bags is the decoration, so what you get depends entirely on which shops you use. Iron the layers between parchment until the sheet is stiff enough to hold a cut edge, then cut circles. They are waterproof by definition, they wipe clean, and no two come out the same.
Get the full tutorial at Creative Jewish Mom.
16. Plastic Bag Jump Rope
Flatten the bags, cut the handles off, cut long strips, and do not fuss about making them the same width, because the finished braid hides all of it. Tie twelve strips together, split them into two groups of six, tape each group to a chair back and braid them the way you braided friendship bracelets. Then twist the two finished braids around each other, which is the step that gives the rope enough weight to swing properly instead of flopping. Duck tape wrapped around each end makes the handles. The maker reports it survives jumping, limbo and being used to drag a wagon.
Get the full tutorial at Childhood List.
17. Plastic Bag Pom Poms
Three pom poms in hot pink, yellow and blue, made the ordinary way, wrapped and tied and trimmed, but in plastic instead of wool, so the cut ends stand out stiff and crisp rather than going soft. They hold that shape forever and they do not flatten under a gift or wilt in the rain. The sizes matter more than the technique: a tiny one is a gift topper, a hand sized one is a garland unit, and the big one in the photo is a party decoration on its own. Colored produce bags are where the brights come from.
Get the full tutorial at Creative Jewish Mom.
18. Plastic Bag Hammock
Not a weekend project, and worth being honest about that. This was a university installation assignment: roughly 600 used bags twisted into rope, knotted into an open diamond net with colored ties at every intersection, strung on a 2×4 frame with rope and a ring, and the photo shows two people working on it on the floor. No dimensions are published, no weight rating, and the brief was about repetition and scavenged material rather than about load. Take it as the thing at the far end of what a pile of bags can become, and as the best argument on this page for sorting your bags by color first.
Get the full tutorial at DIY Not, University of Illinois.
19. Outdoor Pillows With Plastic Bag Insets
The clever bit is the filling, not the sewing. Two 14 by 14 inch pieces of outdoor fabric with a 1 inch seam allowance, a 9 inch zipper set in the top seam with a zipper foot, and an appliqued anchor on the front, all of it standard. Then it gets stuffed with plastic bags instead of a pillow form, on the theory that if it gets rained on the whole thing drains and dries instead of holding water like a sponge. It also means you cannot use an envelope back, because loose bags will find the gap.
Get the full tutorial at Mamaging.
20. Plastic Bag Printmaking
A plastic bag is a non absorbent surface, which is the only thing a monotype plate has to be, and that is the entire idea. Roll paint onto the bag with a brayer or brush it on, then scratch marks into it with a toothpick, a pencil end or a cotton swab, or add more brushstrokes on top. Lay the inked bag face down on paper or fabric, roll over the back a few times, and peel. Whatever ink is left gives you a second, fainter ghost print. Layer several to build a background, then add detail on top once it dries.
Get the full tutorial at Alisa Burke.
21. Garbage Jellyfish
A foam fruit tray, the pleated kind an Asian pear arrives in, turned upside down as the bell, with a plastic bag cut into long ragged strips hanging underneath as tentacles, hung from a ceiling so the light comes through it. The artist wanted a whole bloom of them in a kitchen skylight and then discovered the foam trays come from China in minimum orders of 1,500 at over $300, which is the sort of detail that tells you exactly how far somebody got. Start saving the trays from the fruit aisle now.
Get the full tutorial at Reptangle.
22. Beautiful Baskets From Plastic Bags
Around forty carrier bags, flattened, handles off, each one rolled tight from the closed end and taped so it becomes a firm cord. Wind garden twine around a bundle for about two inches, fold it into a loop and tape it, then coil the bundle around that loop, stitching each new round to the one below with twine on a large needle. Once the base is the size you want, stack rounds upward instead of outward. The handles get plaited from the bag handles you cut off and threaded through two rounds below the rim. It is waterproof and it will pear out at the base.
Get the full tutorial at Lucky Ladybird Craft.
23. Plastic Bag Hat
A wide brimmed sun hat crocheted in plarn, worked as a flat spiral for the crown, straight down for the sides and then out again for the brim, in a mottled green and yellow that came from whatever bags were in the pile. Plastic is the right material for a beach hat and nobody thinks of it: it does not go soft in humidity, it does not mind being sat on in a bag, and a rain shower simply runs off it. The dark edging round the brim is a single round of sorted bags and it is what makes the shape read.
Get the full tutorial at Hermien Combrink Cox, published at Recyclart.
24. Parachute Plastic Bag Kids Toy
An 8 inch square or circle cut from a bag, a hole in each corner, an 8 inch length of yarn tied through each one, all four gathered and tied to a little figure twisted out of a pipe cleaner. Then you climb a step ladder and drop it. The reason to do it properly is the comparison: cut the same 8 inch canopy from a coffee filter, from tissue paper and from cotton and drop all four, and air resistance stops being a phrase in a book. Reinforce tissue paper holes with tape. Let the child choose the string length, because then it is theirs.
Get the full tutorial at Inspiration Laboratories.
25. Four Stranded Braid With Plastic Bags
Half a dozen lengths of bright yellow four strand braid laid out on a pale table, each one dense and round rather than flat, with a flash of green where a different bag got worked in. A four strand braid is the one worth learning here, because unlike a three strand it comes out rope like and holds its own shape, which is what you want for a bag handle, a strap, a basket rim or a belt. Yellow this clean means sorted bags, almost certainly produce or pharmacy bags, not the usual mixed white.
Get the full tutorial at Creative Jewish Mom.
