How to make Plarn from bread bags

Did you know bread bags make really great Plarn! And it’s so easy to do. In this post I show you step by step how to turn bread bags into plarn. You’ll be plarning all your bags, thin carrier bags, toilet roll bags and bread bags. This loop method works well for all of these.

What on earth is “plarn”? Plarn is short for plastic bag yarn. It’s a great way to reuse plastic bags. But not plastic bags are suitable, it doesn’t suit thicker plastics like the “bags for life” (pah who are they kidding!). Try the spiral or continuous plarn method for these instead. There are plenty tutorials out there so just google “continuous plarn” and up they’ll come.

I prefer this knotting method for making plarn from bread bags. In the UK our bread is often sold in plastic bags. You can now recycle these bags at larger supermarkets with lots of other plastic wrapping and bags too. Whether many really do get recycled through this route is hotly debated (according to media reporting) but it’s good that it encourages consumers to want to recycle plastic. Reuse is always a great option to consider.

So back to our bread bag plarn…

Materials needed

• Several clean plastic bags (how many depends on what you want to make with your plarn)
• Sharp scissors

How to prepare plastic bags for plarn

First shake out bread crumbs into a food bin or refuse bin, rinse out to ensure any remaining crumbs are removed. Then wash them in either washing up or laundry detergent, rinse thoroughly and air dry your bags to ensure they are fully dry before use. You may want to turn them inside out first to dry and then turn them the other way to dry some more.

How to make plarn

1. Lay out your clean plastic bag on a table and smooth it out

2. Fold in half lengthways

3. Fold in half again

4. And fold in half again, so you have a long thin rectangle.

5. Trim off the open end to neaten up.

6. Trim off the closed end just above where it joins sides to ensure it’s all off put aside to discard (I put mine in with torn unusable bags for recycling – because I hope Tesco actually does recycle it and not just ship it abroad to litter a 3rd World country!). You now have a long thin rectangle shape, trimmed at each end so that they are no longer sealed closed.

7. Fold the rectangle in half and holding both ends taught, snip. This is a super neat and easy way to cut it.

8. Repeat folding in half and cutting each piece until you have pieces approx 1″ wide or just bigger. This is a perfect size.

9. Open out your strips. If you have distinctly different colours you may want to separate them out and make up small plarn balls in each colour.  If not just go with multicolour and start joining.

10. Take 2 strips and loop one through the other. Pull to form a knot, and gently tighten. If you pull too hard it will stretch and may snap so easy does it.

11. Continue to join and then roll up into a ball.

It’s practical to make plarn as you need it rather than make a big ball in one go. There are a few reasons I suggest this. Firstly you may want to work with set colours or work on a project that has colour changes so you’ll only want to make enough and no more. You can’t just snip the way you do with yarn, you’d have to unjoin and that’s difficult  to do without snapping it.  To change colour just loop on new plarn and away you go.

If you fancy getting started on a plarn project I’ve put a few fab links together in a post here.  I will have some plarn patterns free on the blog one day too, have fun making Plarn and do let me know how you get on.

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Thank you for reading x💚x