If you are like me, you just hate not saving those pretty Christmas cards that you receive each year. So let’s recycle those beautiful old cards into something new and keep on enjoying them.
Here is a before photo of the cards that I punched holes all around the edges.
Next you just need a small crochet hook to work into the holes. I use a small hole punch and a C (2.75 mm) crochet hook in my projects. I have a picture tutorial and full details can be found here on how to make these recycled Christmas card ornaments.
Here is one of my favorite cards, that I cut in half and glued the pieces back to back. See photo below of each side of this Christmas ornament.
Here are two Christmas towels that I bought at the Dollar Store. They make wonderful holiday themed towels by adding a crocheted towel topper with a jingle bell.
I used the double layered towel topper pattern that is a free crochet pattern.
I did work the handle on 8 stitches just because this 24/7 cotton yarn is thin. This gives the handle a bit more strength for hanging it up. For the buttonhole, I crocheted 2 chains and skipped 2 stitches for the space for the jingle bell. Depending on the size of the button or jingle bell you use, just adjust your stitches to make the hole big enough for the size you need.
Here is one more photo of the other Christmas towel topper.
This is the 16th Thanksgiving that this blog is celebrating. I can’t believe it’s been that many years since I first started My Recycled Bags back in 2007. But time flies as they say and even faster now that I am older.
Wishing everyone a wonderful, blessed Thanksgiving!
A few months ago I shared that I dyed my first batch of wool yarn using grape Kool-Aid. I dyed just one white skein of wool yarn in my first attempt. You can read the full post here about how I dyed the yarn using Kool-Aid. I was really happy how my test came out and here are the baby hats I crocheted using that yarn.
First I crocheted this ribbed band baby hat. The free crochet pattern is found here. I used a G (4.25 mm) crochet hook for this project and did add few extra rows of the ribbing to reach a hat length of 5 inches long.
Next hat was crocheted using the
I picked up a few of the Halloween kitchen towels at Dollar Tree to add towel toppers to them. These themed towels are a fun and quick project that I am using for a upcoming fundraiser.
The towel topper is added to the towel by simply folding it in half and crocheting along the top edge. No cutting or sewing is needed. The first row is challenging but using a fine point steel crochet hook really helps. Once that first row is complete, the rest of the pattern works up very quickly. The free crochet pattern is found
I shared last month that I was working on a new crocheted recycled tote bag. I call this recycled bag my harvest tote bag. I used mainly white retail bags for the tote but added orange and black bags to create a Halloween harvest themed tote.
As you can imagine, orange and black plastic bags are hard to come by. So with such few of these bags available, I was only able to use them sparely in crocheting this recycled tote bag project. I used the free recycled grocery tote pattern to crochet the project. Just follow the original pattern with the following changes. The harvest stripes were crocheted with one round of black plarn followed by four rounds with orange plarn and then one more round using black plarn. My plarn (plastic bag yarn) is made by
I crocheted this baby dog lovey using Aggie May’s round ripple blanket pattern. I started with 4 rounds using aran cream yarn for the center of the lovey. An important tip is to use the same color for center of lovey as the animal so you can hide the joining. The dog lovey pattern is available
free here.
I first crocheted the round ripple blanket to 21 inches wide. Some loveys are smaller but I like it a little bigger to accommodate the dog head. Here is the lovey blanket before adding the dog to the center.
Next is a photo of the head after I added the muzzle and nose. I had to play around with it quite a bit to get everything lined up and get the nose just right.
Here is a closeup of the dog lovey below.
Our local Stitchers group was asked to make some baby blankets for the hospital nursery. I chose this bobble baby blanket pattern to crochet for the hospital charity. There are many different sizes you can make using this pattern. I started out by chaining 133 stitches using a H (5 mm) hook to begin the crochet pattern with a single strand of yarn.
Crocheting the bobbles for me was very labor intensive and hard on my hands. So rather than having bobbles every 4th row, I only crocheted two rows of bobbles on the ends of the blanket. The remainder of the blanket is worked in half double crochet (HDC).
Here is a closeup of one edge of the baby blanket.
I started crocheting a new plastic bag aka plarn project. I am using one of my original plastic bag tote patterns to crochet this bag. The pattern features a single crochet base so it’s nice and sturdy for groceries or other such needs.
I still have plenty of old plastic bags on hand but I don’t collect as any as I used to. Many areas and stores don’t use the thinner plastic retail bags any longer. This ball of plastic bag yarn was made by cutting the plastic retail sacks in 1 inch strips using the looping method.
Here is my progress so far in the photo below.
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