Reduce, Reuse, Recycle….words that are just repeated and happily forgotten in our daily chores. But one fine day we actually sit down to follow this three word instruction manual the world would be a much cleaner and breathable and all the hulla hoo and go green campaigns and ads would suffer losses. Now here is Cristen Andrews from Austin, Texas who is busy crocheting the plastic bags into fashionable durable items.
While Cristen thinks plastic bags should ultimately be eradicated, she crochets with them because it’s a good method of recycling these bags that would otherwise end up in the streets, landfills, or the bellies of animals. She has been making things like backpacks, shopping bags, hats, floor mats, water bottle holders, and drink koosies.
Last year Christen embarked upon a year-long trip around the world. While the trip wasn’t about crochet teaching, she did quite a bit of it during her travels – teaching in various impromptu workshops to people in places like Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Iceland, and Australia. Though she wasn’t in any of these countries long enough to do this on a larger scale, but this definitely generated a lot of interest in her idea as Cristen has always envisioned of turning her concept into a self sustaining project – one that has a direct impact on improving the lives of underprivileged women and their families.
During a previous trip to India, she had noticed a tremendous plastic waste problem. So decided to teach them to perform basic crochet stitches and create simple bag designs that would help them to become skilled artisans capable of transforming waste materials into fashionable products. Then Hostelling International granted her a small travel scholarship this year, a crowd-sourced funding site for artistic endeavors called Kickstarter, gave her the opportunity to return to India sooner than she had thought. And Miguel, her partner, and Christen spent this summer traveling through Mumbai, Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Delhi to try to kick this plan into action.
During their travels, they connected with various NGOs, community groups, and individuals dedicated to similar goals. And managed to teach 13 formal workshops in addition to several more informal ones – showing about 600-700 people the basics of plastic bag crochet.
This project as Christen likes to call it is very much in its baby stages, but currently they are in the process of developing a product line (Gamesh Bags), creating a web site (GameshBags.com), and exploring marketing opportunities. One can also keep updated with her work and cause at her blog BagsBeGone.com.
