She turns plastic into items for the homeless

She’s proud to call herself the bag lady. Now, Lisa Wadup is hoping there will be a lot more bag people to follow in her footsteps. Wadup takes plastic bags by the hundreds, cuts them up into what she calls plarn, or plastic yarn, and crochets them into pillows and mats she passes on to homeless people. “It’s been three years since I started, and I probably made 100 of them so far,” Wadup said. On Saturday afternoon, she gave a workshop to about 20 volunteers at St. George’s Anglican Church — steps away from the Bell Centre — to pass on her knowledge of how to spin plastic bags into mats and pillows, a labour of love for Wadup that takes roughly 15 hours and several hundred bags once all the material is collected. “It takes a lot of labour because you have to collect the bags,” Wadup said. “You have to cut the bags, you have to loop them together, make a ball and then crochet them.” Wadup can use any kind of plastic bag to make a pillow, but she prefers to use bags used to hold milk bags for the mats. “Milk bags are the best,” she said. “The material is really good. They are slippy, and they have some sort of antibiotic on them to keep them clean because they are food.” Wadup has become well known in the community since she posted a plea on Facebook asking for hundreds of plastic bags. She received many from a church in Montreal West that also had been making mats out of bags and sending them to Haiti. When that project stopped, the church gave their bags to Wadup. Deborah Hinton, a people’s warden of St. George’s Anglican Church, said she and her friend Verona Sorensen decided to organize Saturday’s session because they heard Wadup was leaving in the spring of next year when she retires from working as a nurse at the Montreal General Hospital. For St. George’s, making the mats is just another way the church is helping out Montreal’s homeless community. The church has a partnership with the Wolf Pack Street Patrol and has a monthly program called Meals to the Street with members of the Muslim community to bring shawarma to people living on the streets. St. George’s also opened a drop-in centre two years ago for people to come in, get food, warm up and recharge their phones. Hinton hopes the centre can help out even more by providing the mats and pillows. “The advantage this has for a homeless person is that it raises them a tiny bit off the ground, so it makes them more comfortable, but it’s waterproof, and getting wet is a big problem when you are cold and on the street,” Hinton said. “If you put it over a grate, it will capture the heat and make it warm, too. It’s better than cardboard.” Sorensen agreed the mats can make a big difference in someone’s life. “Someone living in an alley near the Red Roof Church received one and was so thankful, telling people it was the first time in 11 years he slept with a pillow,” Sorensen said Hinton said the group plans to get together again next month to make mats and to learn more from Wadup. But to do that they will need hundreds of plastic bags. The church is asking people who might have plastic bags lying around their house to donate them to the day centre, located at the church’s southwestern corner between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. every day. As for Wadup, she plans to continue her work crocheting plastic yarn, or plarn as she calls it, into gold for someone living on the street.

Milk bags are the best. The material is really good. They are slippy, and they have some sort of antibiotic on them to keep them clean.