The beads and diamonds pattern has been on my radar for several years now. I thought it would make a wonderful recycled plastic bag project. I wanted to recycle the black plastic bags that I have for the project. I have been saving black bags up in hopes of having enough to crochet the complete pattern, but sadly I didn’t have enough.

So I added some of the pink salmon plastic bags that newspapers come in. It added a nice contrast allowing me to finish the bag. I did have to shorten the top due to the lack of black plastic bags.

Many people ask me about the yardage when using recycled bags as plarn. These black retail-sized bags results were: 4 bags cut 3/4″ wide = 50 yards of plarn.

The free crochet pattern is found here. The original pattern is written for regular acrylic yarn or cotton so if crocheting with plastic bags isn’t your thing, use something else.

Here is one more photo of the bag hanging up.

My mods to the pattern: I worked all in the round without joining or chaining 1 to start each round.

Using plastic bag yarn or plarn, my bag base after round 10 was 5.5″ wide by 13″ long.

For round 11, TURN so beads are on the right side of bag. With plarn, the one side isn’t as nice so you must turn. So for each round of beads turn and then turn back again for the next round.

At round 18, I changed to pink salmon bags as running low on black plarn.

Generally I followed the pattern as written except at round 30, I did a few decreases of stitches on both sides of the bag. But as I said, I was running short of bags so at round 37 I finished with 4 rounds of half double crochet (HDC) stitches. I crocheted one strap by chaining a long strip and joined at sides. Then turn and single crochet (SC) back and forth for a total of 4 rows for 1.5″ wide strap that is 26 inches long.

Final size: 14′ wide at base, 10″ wide at top by 10″ tall with 26″ strap.

Overall a great pattern that made a cool looking recycled plastic bag purse!