CROCHETING PLASTIC

Crochet "jelly-fish" form made from plastic-bag yarn, by Margaret Wertheim.

As a response to the horror of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the IFF has taken up crocheting plastic junk. We'd love for you all to join us in this task. If you want to contribute to the Crochet Reef, we'd really really like you to think about plastic!

In addition to the beautiful yarn-based forms, the IFF Crochet Reef includes a very large sub-reef crocheted from yarn and plastic trash, known fondly as "The Toxic Reef" aka Bikini Atoll. The Toxic Reef is the only one of the IFF sub-Reefs that will be allowed to grow infinitely - because plastic trash in the ocean is itself is growing infinitely. All manner of plastic stuff lends itself to crochet and once you start looking it's amazing how many plastic-yarn-and-string-type products are out there: gift-tie ribbon, for instance, and that stuff for making lanyards. We're not plastic purists; we often find that amazing textures and structures can be made by mixing together yarn and plastic. Try using gift-tie or plastic string crocheted with ladder-ribbon, or worsted, or novelty yarns - the plastic gives structural strength, the yarns color and texture. Most of all, however, we want to focus on recycling plastic trash, especially our own trash. It's fun to work with things you can buy at Michaels, its harder and more challenging to see what you can do with what's in your bin. A key ingredient is plastic shopping bags, which can be cut up and tied into yarn, and we want the Toxic Reef to contain lots of plastic-bag forms. One of our inspirations here is our wonderful Australian contributor, Helle Jorgensen who is a master of plastic-bag crochet.

Plastic-bag-yarn fire-coral by Helle Jorgensen.
See here for more of Helle's beautiful plastic-bag sea creatures.
http://hellejorgensen.typepad.com/photos/artcraft/index.html

Plastic-bag-yarn is actually quite lovely to work with - its soft and pliable and glides through yours hands. The painful part of the process is making the yarn. The best technique for doing this was invented by our Australian contributor Helle Jorgensen and you can see on Helle's blog for an excellent tutorial. We highly recommend you look at this before starting. Once you've made your basic form you can decorate it with all sorts of other plastic rubbish - cut-up bits of pill packages, plastic bottle tops, old biros, plastic forks, discarded toys, or any other geep-gaws that wind up in your waste bin. Once you start in on this there's no end to what you can do with your trash. Though – truly - the most productive thing would be to not generate so much of it in the first place. Do we really need entire supermarket isles devoted to endless variations of throw-away curlicued crap? How about using a nice piece of string next time you give a gift?

Tutorial in making Plastic Bag Yarn:
http://hellejorgensen.typepad.com/gooseflesh/2007/02/plastic_bag_yar.html

We call the model above "A Week's Shopping." Its made from the plastic shopping bags we collected from a single trip to the supermarket when we forgot to take our canvas carry-bags. Its a hyperbolic plane with a scalloped edge and an inadvertently pertinent message that happened to be left on the tail-end of the yarn Margaret made.

Each year we Americans use 380 billion plastic shopping bags. That's three and a half plastic bags per person per day. It is estimated that only 5% of these get recycled. Many of them end up in the sea where turtles and albatross and other marine creatures mistake them for jelly fish. The plastic shopping bag is not an existential necessity. Another object for reconsideration is the plastic water bottle. Every hour Americans discard 2.5 million of these. That's 22 billion bottles a year. Remember when water came out of a tap? And
there are still two billion people on planet earth for whom that remains a distant dream. Safety is often cited as a reason to buy bottled water, but city water is far better monitored than the vast commercial-water industry. Water is the most basic substance of life - there are organisms that can live without oxygen, but none that can live without water - and no product so represents the triumph of marketing over need than a bottle of this primordial liquid. When next you reach for one think about this: plastic is a petroleum-based product that never biodegrades. The trace of that bottle will remain in the geological record for millions of years.

Hyperbolic psuedosphere made from plastic-string, decorated with pieces of used pill packages, by Christine Wertheim.

At the IFF we have taken up the challenge of cutting down our personal plastic quotient. Since the start of 2007 we have been keeping all our plastic waste. After the first two days we were appalled. After a week we were horrified. After a month we were devastated and began to think hard about how we consumed. Where does it all come from? How does it build up? How can we do better? There is nothing like living with a heap of your own plastic crap to make you think twice about what you bring home from the supermarket. By highlighting plastic waste and recycling it into an "art work" we hope, with The Toxic Reef, to focus attention on the tsunami of plastic that is engulfing our oceans. What we hope to create here is not only an aesthetic experience but a transformation in behavior – beginning with our own.

We encourage everyone to try their own experiment. Keep your plastic for a month. Or even a week. It's staggering how hard it is to avoid the stuff.

Hyperbolic psuedosphere made from plastic gift-tie, decorated with used vitamin-C sachets, by Christine Wertheim.

Left, plastic-bag-string crocheted pillar coral by Karen Page. Right, pillar coral with hyperbolic head by Christine Wertheim.

Kurt Vonnegut once opined that the power of the art as a weapon against the tyranny of the state was roughly equivalent to a custard pie being dropped from the top of a six foot high ladder. We at the IFF concur, and would similarly estimate the power of art as a weapon against the commercial-industrial complex. But for Vonnegut, none of this was an excuse for political inaction. He seemed to think that on a global scale if enough pies were dropped there would eventually be enough custard on the floor that anyone who tried to pick up a gun and shoot would fall down and break a leg. Art is indeed a custard pie. Yet its power lies in the potential to engage us all - not just a special select few - in personal activities that collectively add up, one pie at a time, to a transformative sea of change.

For Kurt's views on art we are indebted to the article "Vonnegut's Pies" by Dwayne Booth in the LA Weekly.
http://www.laweekly.com/columns/a-considerable-town/vonneguts-pies/16129/