Fusing our brains?

Some of the knitters from my regular Tuesday night group came over to my place tonight for an evening of non-fibery crafts. We made fondue--chocolate and cheese, and after some wine and snacks put the food aside (Oh, except for Emily, who was a fan of the mini-beers.) to get to work on the project of the evening.

Heidi taught us how to fuse plastic grocery bags into a sort of fabric. It was really fun, and I don't think we ruined her iron, 'tho we may have gotten a little light-headed on the fumes.

There are many tutorials online that tell how to do this, but you really hardly need a tutorial. All you need are

The thin grocery type of plastic bag,

Velum paper (because for some reason the plastic doesn't stick to that)

An iron.

Everything we did was an experiement--we played with the number of layers of plastic, the temperature of the iron and the kind of bags used.

At the end of the night, we wanted to see if we could make buttons by melting some bags in the oven. These results are cool, but not super useful. Of course, as knitters, we love buttons. We put some cut up bags in mini muffin tins. Here they are before being baked.

We poked holes in them with skewers.

Here are the somewhat other-worldly results.

My own personal favorite project is this wallet I made from a black "liquor store bag" (the one that carried the mini-beers), and a green newspaper bag. I love how the colors melded together, tho' the inside is still quite black. It has a lovely papery look and feel. I "seamed" the wallet by melting the sides. I'm still thinking about closures, maybe a snap, maybe a velcro "dot."

I don't think I'll be doing this very often, because although it seems the fumes are relatively safe, they did irritate my throat a wee bit, and I don't want to be releasing that kind of irritant into the environment in or outside my home regularly. But I'm thrilled to have my wallet!