Women Who Crochet Are Using Old Plastic Bags To Make Sleep Mats For The Homeless

May 10, 2019 by apost team

A new way to help the earth and its inhabitants has emerged over the last couple of years. While plastic normally gets a bad rap, and crocheted items are often seen boring gifts from relatives, both are the superstars of this story.

If you haven’t heard of ‘plarn,’ it’s basically a plastic form of yarn. It’s not just any plastic, though.

Plarn is specifically made from plastic bags that would otherwise be left littering and polluting our streets, oceans, and landfills. Plarn is one step forward in finding recyclable uses for plastic bags.

Another big problem society faces is caring for the basic needs of our homeless population. Many sleep on boxes and worn fabrics that aren’t water- and pest- proof and do little to combat extreme temperatures.

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Take both problems and add the skills of crocheting, and you have plarn sleeping mats.

The plastic bags get reused, and the homeless population have a better sleeping solution that’s mostly rain- and bug-proof, insulates against the cold, is easy to clean, and is lightweight for transporting,

For example, Tennessee’s Janice Akin and her group of friends call themselves the “Bag Ladies.” Back In 2016, a local media station picked up their story, reporting that the ladies had made 88 mats in just nine months. They said making the mats—which used over 50,000 plastic bags—wasn’t that hard, but was very time-consuming.

They say each sleeping bag requires around 500 plastic bags and takes about 50 hours to complete.

According to USA Today, another group in Salinas, California is using the John Steinbeck library for their weekly plarn sleeping bag project. Led by Ramona Romandia, the group of volunteers meets every Thursday to weave six-foot-long plastic mats for the homeless to collect from the First United Methodist Church.

The trend has even hopped across the pond and a group in Clevedon in the UK called the "Clevedon Crochet Corner Social Group" is adding doggie mats to their plarn repertoire, says the North Somerset Times.

For over nine years, The New Life for Old Bags group has been making plarn sleeping bags for Cornerstone Community Outreach in Chicago to pass out to the nation’s homeless. As it stands, they’ve used over 3.2 million plastic bags to make 4,710 mats. The group reports they spend an average of about 80 hours on each mat, but some of the more skilled in the group can knock a mat out in around 30 hours.

In Sardis, Mississippi, a women’s church group is collecting bags every week for their plarn crocheting efforts. The 15 or so ladies have used their crocheting skills into free sleeping bags for their local homeless community. The local community is very proud of them and WREG did a story about them.

Watch the Sardis ladies in action in the video below.

Are you interested in starting a plarn mat group of your own? Tell us about it in the comment section. Don’t forget to pass this inspiring story along to others so that the plarn movement can expand and continue to help those who need it most.