Every Thursday morning, a group of volunteers gathers at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Virginia Beach to craft.
Their colorful, crocheted creations look like they’re made of typical yarn. But look closer and you can see the material is more shiny and crinkly.
“It’s purely plastic bags,” said Eileen Keenan. “T-shirt bags, grocery bags, doggy poop bags.”
Keenan and half a dozen others participate in a project called PLARN – aka plastic yarn. They upcycle plastic bags into sleeping mats for people without homes.
Last week, they laughed and chatted as they sat around a table topped with crafting tools and bags in various colors and stages of production.
First, Gail Orlin inspected each bag for holes, folded it in half then passed it to Janet McGraw, who carefully sliced off the top and bottom sections and cut the rest of the bag into strips.
Cindy Romero served as quality control, snapping each strip to ensure they’re strong enough not to rip.
Kim Nichter and Bonnie Corcoran worked the plastic strips into PLARN by tying and looping them together, then rolling them into yarn-like balls.
Corcoran and Keenan are the crocheters, painstakingly threading a large needle through the plastic loops until they reach a sleeping bag-sized mat. They work on the project not only on Thursdays but at home while watching TV, or waiting at doctors' offices.
It takes about a month to make a mat — and each requires 500 to 700 plastic bags. That means the ladies are always on the hunt for more.
“I will chase them in a parking lot,” Nichter said. “When I come out of Food Lion and I see one start blowing, I’m running after it. Anything to just get the bags.”
Other bags come from shopping trips, ordering dog poop bags in bulk and donations from people within and outside of the congregation.
When Wegmans announced it would phase out single-use plastic bags a few years ago, Orlin reached out and secured a donation of 25,000 remaining bags from the grocer.
The Church of the Holy Apostles, which is Catholic and Episcopal, picked up the program in 2021 after learning of a similar one at nearby Essential Church.
Nichter, social ministry co-chair at the former, said the churches partnered, with the Holy Apostles team helping make the PLARN material and sending it to Essential for the final crocheting step.
Eventually, Holy Apostles took over, with Keenan and a few others teaching themselves to crochet from YouTube videos. They’ve made 117 mats so far.
Mats are delivered to PiN Ministry in Virginia Beach, which then distributes them to homeless people alongside other essentials such as clothing and hygiene supplies.
The plastic mats serve as a barrier beneath sleeping bags, keeping them dry and deterring insects.
“It’s actually helping somebody,” Nichter said. “Plus, it brought like a fellowship. We could laugh and joke and have conversations and everything while doing good for everybody.”
PLARN scraps go to a company that uses plastic bags to make benches.
“Nothing is wasted,” Nichter said.
McGraw said she doesn’t attend the church as a parishioner. After retiring several years ago, she wanted to volunteer and came across the initiative online.
“I thought, ‘that looks interesting,’’ she said. “It broadens my horizon of meeting people. And doing something for the community.”
