Plastic Shopping Bag

My mother-in-law Alice could be quite surprising. She looked twenty years younger than her age, for a sweet lady, she was a fierce Scrabble competitor, and she cleaned her own house until she was in her late 90s. But what shocked me the most was her ability to make one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

Take a good look. That's a plastic shopping bag, made out of plastic shopping bags! She collected them for a long time and sorted them into colors. There are white, brown and blue, each color from a different local grocery store.

I wanted to make a bag too and asked her to teach me. She looked at me vaguely and said, "Well, you just have to crochet it." Never mind that I don't know how to crochet, nor had I ever seen her crochet. Or that she couldn't explain to me any more clearly how she had done it. According to her, you just did it.

She did show me how to make the plastic bags into the "yarn." You cut the plastic bag into strips and then hook them together with a simple knot. After that the instructions became fuzzy. So that's a start. But that's as far as I've ever gotten.

I found a site on the interweb explaining the process, but since I don't crochet, I don't really understand what it means. That's ok. Someday I'll figure it out and I'll make myself the coolest shopping bag ever.

And every time I use it, I'll think of Alice.