Bag ladies (and men)
Church members create community, charity with recycling project
When Jan Reister first heard about making sleeping mats out of something called “plarn” two years ago from a friend in Michigan, she knew she wanted to bring the idea back to her church in Nassau Bay.
The multicolored mats would help the people who don’t have homes in the area around Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, and making them would be a productive activity for church members.
But first Reister said she had the same reaction that most everyone does.
“I thought ‘what the heck is plarn?’” she said.
Now Reister and members of the sleeping mat-making group she started in early 2015 are much more familiar with the material — a sort of oversized “yarn” made out of plastic grocery sacks that can be woven like fabric into various craft projects like bags, quilts and mats.
Reister estimates that collectively, the group has spent hundreds of hours cutting up sacks to make the plastic yarn and turning it into sleeping mats for homeless people in the Houston area.
Group members work at home and meet twice a month at Gloria Dei to make the mats,
and Reister said that the craft has become a positive force in ways she didn’t expect.
“It’s just one of those things that has met different needs in different ways,” she said.
There’s the intended benefit — providing a soft place to sleep or sit for people who don’t have one. The mats get passed out every month at various social service events to anybody who asks for one, and Reister said that her group, which has grown from six members to around 20, has made 110 mats.
The mats, which take about a month’s worth of work to make, are equipped with a shoulder harness so people can wear them while they’re walking, and the 750 or so grocery sacks that go into making a single 3-foot-by6-foot mat create a plush surface that’s thicker than a yoga mat.
“There’s a little layer of squish, a little cushion,” said Julie Conner, who crochets the mats and has reduced her mat-making time from 60 hours to 40 since she joined the group last June. “The loops of plastic yarn help to keep the mat off the ground.”
Also there’s an ecofriendly aspect to the craft. Group members noted the thousands of plastic sacks that they have collected since they started asking for bag donations. Repurposing the sacks into something useful has undoubtedly cleaned up the area, where some of them would have inevitably ended up as litter.
“The whole church started donating bags, so you can just imagine how many there were, and how many were kept out of the landfill,” said MaryAnne Davis, who cuts the bags into strips at home with her husband and brings them to meetings. “We had them everywhere.”
Then there’s the process of making a mat itself, which Reister said gives elderly people a simple activity they can do while they’re sitting down at home watching TV. Some people at Gloria Dei had been wanting to get involved with a helpful church or community program that benefits the homeless, Reister said, but not everyone was in good enough health to pitch in.
The work that goes into making a sleeping mat, however, involves a few different steps that can be easily divvied up according to what people are able to do.
“There were several ladies who were widows and needed to belong to a group and feel like they were helping someone,” Reister said. “And then we had a couple gentlemen in the beginning stages of dementia, and they loved to cut those bags into loops. Another gentleman was retired and elderly and doesn’t get out much, but every time we meet him and his wife come and pick up the bags and bring back the final product the next time. It all really blossomed.”
Some people in the group cut the plastic sacks into strips — a good task for anyone who’s watching TV at home. Other group members are in charge of looping the strips into plastic yarn and crocheting the material into a mat.
“It took a little time to get used to it, because it’s obviously a lot thicker than cotton yarn or wool that you use to make sweaters,” Conner said.” But the stitch you use is a basic single crochet stitch.”
Distributing the mats is a good way to connect with the community, group members say, as is teaching people the process. Group members have visited nursing homes and area elementary schools to teach people about the craft, and the idea has started to catch on. And not only around Houston, either.
“It sort of mushroomed,” Conner said. “It’s woven its way into a variety of communities. I was looking for instructions on the web — Pinterest has all kinds of stuff about it — and there are churches in Kentucky and West Virginia that have started working with their food pantries to supply mats for folks. It’s spreading by word of mouth around the country.”