The Plarn Collection: Poppy Hat

How's this for something different? "The Poppy" is a cloche-style hat made out of plarn from white shopping bags, red newspaper bags, and VHS tape! It was inspired by the crocheted pattern by Teresa Wooley, and makes for a really unique and fun fashion statement.

This hat will be one-of-a-kind, because to be honest, I hated working with VHS tape. It hurt my fingers and squeaked SO LOUDLY that you could hear me knitting from across a really big room. But I'm glad I soldiered through! VHS tape offers unrivaled sparkle, plus there's just a certain cool factor of wearing something made from so unlikely a material.

I really love the flower on the hat. I made it on a little flower loom, which I'm especially proud of because I made it all by myself. The loom itself is hideously ugly - it was a plastic jewelry case which looked nice until it got all ripped up when I drilled dozens of holes in it. I'll probably only put up pictures if Collin decides to build me a nice one and then I can show you how ugly the one I made for myself was. But it works, and I really like the resulting flower! It totally completes the look of this hat.

It is an adult-sized hat and doesn't fit Annie at all, but she was so adorable when she tried it on that I had to include pictures. Besides being a fun around-town hat for a woman, it would make a great dress-up hat for a girl!

Suggested retail: $30

Guitar Straps

The first time I saw guitar straps woven on an inkle loom I was inspired. Guitar straps are both useful and a perfect place to showcase your unique style. They also are a fairly simple shape that allows for a lot of variety in pattern and material. I wove the following four guitar straps to try out a few different techniques and yarns, and I love them all! Check them out!

This fiery strap is woven from recycled, hand-painted cotton yarn from an old sweater. I dyed it in stripes while it was still knit up in the sweater pieces, then unraveled it and wove this guitar strap. It is lightweight, flexible and smooth, yet still with the strength that comes from a warp-faced weave that you get on an inkle loom.

A more bulky version is this guitar strap woven from t-yarn. That's right, this one is made from recycled t-shirts! Unlike the other straps, I didn't have to dye the yarn to get these vibrant colors - each color came from a different t-shirt.

This close-up lets you see the texture of the woven t-yarn. It's very sturdy, and has a small amount of stretch that makes it comfortable to wear. Like all the other guitar straps, the end tabs are made from a recycled black leather jacket. Only the hardware is new!

This extra-long strap has two very neat features. It was card-woven, so it is a little thicker than the other cotton straps and features in intricate pattern unique to card-weaving. It also has a variegated yarn that was dyed in a rainbow, which makes the pattern shift from red to orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple as your eye travels down the length of the strap. It is made from recycled wool yarns, and is perfect for taller guitarists who need a longer strap.

Finally, my favorite one is woven from hand-dyed recycled purple and green cotton/acrylic blend yarn along with cassette tape. The cassette tape gives the strap a really fun retro feel, as well as an amazing sparkle. I love the effect and am looking forward to using it again in another guitar strap with a different color combination.

(By the way, when I say this one is my favorite, I mean that I couldn't bear to take it off my guitar after we were done taking photos this morning. It's still hiding in my guitar case, and I'm seriously considering weaving another one to sell, just so I can keep this one. It's so cool.)

All the guitar straps are 2 inches wide, and all except the rainbow-patterned one are the standard size of 30-60 inches. The extra-large size gives you another 6 inches, adjusting from 36-66 inches.

Suggested Retail: $30

The Plarn Collection Blue Rainbow Chullo Purse

A chullo hat is the traditional Peruvian earflap hat worn up in the Andes mountains. This bag was originally designed by Mary Jane Mucklestone, who looked at a chullo earflap and thought, "That would look great blown way up and turned into a purse!" I loved the idea, and adapted it into this colorful plarn purse.

Five colors of plastic bags went into this purse, four of them from newspaper sleeves, with the green from the large-size Goodwill bags. Thanks go to a neighbor and a friend for saving bags for me and helping me collect a full rainbow of color!

The purse closes with a loop and vintage-button closure.

It is fully lined with an upcycled woven cotton shirt, complete with the shirt pocket for storing your wallet or cell phone.

More than almost anything I've knit recently, people have asked me about this bag. Whether I was working on it at the park or at the doctor's waiting room, people have stopped to take a look and then brought their friends over to see what I was working on. It's a real conversation starter when you think about the new uses you can put to seemingly useless materials!

Suggested Retail: $35

The Plarn Collection: Farmer's Market Bag

I love string market bags. They expand to hold large quantities of oddly-shaped purchases, yet collapse down into something you can easily stuff into your purse. They're deceptively strong, and very pretty with their eyelet lace structure. And, of course, re-using your own bag is better stewardship of our resources than using disposable plastic bags. Here's a new take on a traditional string market bag: one made entirely from recycled plastic grocery bags.

This plarn bag appears small before you fill it, but can actually hold a watermelon (our Saturday farmer's market prize from today) or about a dozen ears of corn. Try doing that with a regular flimsy plastic bag and you'll end up with a torn bag and corn on the ground!

The bow is decorative and entirely removable if you want to give this market bag to a man.

Suggested Retail $20

The Plarn Collection: Blue Geranium Sunhat

This portfolio has been in need of a good update for a while now. So much has happened since last fall, the most important being that my husband and I are anticipating the birth of our second daughter almost any day now. That makes it kind of a crazy time to try and get my portfolio up-to-date and ready for the fall preview, but I'm going to seize these last few days and try to do just that.

I had a bad case of creative block all winter (too much morning sickness, too little sunshine), and have spent the spring and summer catching up and getting back into creating mode. Fortunately, my inventory is filling up with lots of fun and exciting items, and I can't wait to share some of them with you!

Recently I've been experimenting with new recycled materials, including "plarn" which is yarn made from recycled plastic bags. There are lots of tutorials on how to make plarn, and I found the one from Cindy on MyRecycledBags.com to be most helpful. Most people who are experimenting with plarn are crocheters, so I've been exploring how the medium can be used in knitting. First up: A plarn sunhat.

This hat was made with a large variety of white shopping bags, including bags from Walmart to JoAnn fabrics to those generic red-printed "Thank You" bags you get everywhere from the Asian grocery to the Salvation Army. Combining all these bags makes a cool effect, because although the predominant color is still white, little colored flecks show the origin of the bags which make up the hat. It's fun to hold the hat and think about all the variety of things the bags held in their previous lives.

The flowers and hat band were made with newspaper bags given to me by a kind neighbor. Actually, he gave me a whole laundry basket full of colored newspaper bags, and it took me over a week to sort and turn them all into plarn! You'll be seeing more from those bags later, I promise.

The texture is surprisingly elastic and bendable. As a matter of fact, this sunhat fits both my toddler Annie and me fairly well. We both have very large heads for our respective ages, and although it's a little snug on me it would fit most children to adults very well. A thin wire is threaded through the outside of the brim, stabilizing it and allowing you to shape it to frame your face best.

Suggested retail: $30