Trash Craft: Photo Frame from Plastic Bag

I almost forgot to update you on our trash craft project. We were hunting for ideas for our very own trash craft. Sony spoke to some of her friends but they shared ideas that we had already seen in the school exhibition. Finally, we found what we wanted. This was new...at least for Sony and me.

We read about the gum wrapper chains that many people around the world had been making. We read about the bags some people had been making out of chewing gum wrappers. And we came across this website that said that the Guinness World Record holding longest gum wrapper chain is over 19 km long and made only of Wrigley wrappers.

So we decided to first make a gum wrapper chain and then see what we could make out of it. However, none of us in the family had chewed gum recently. So obviously there was not a single gum wrapper to start our project. We decided to use an old and torn plastic bag instead. Oh yes, the humble panni. Like most Indians, I also store a lot of used plastic bags under my mattress. So the first step for us was to choose the one that would be of a more or less uniform color. We chose a black bag with prints in white and red. It was from a saree shop in Bhubaneswar. Don't know why I ever stored it. But it came in really handy that night.

Sony cut small strips from the bag and we folded each piece like we would do a gum wrapper. But soon we realized that the plastic would not hold as strong as a gum wrapper. To give it some support, we decided to cut strips of paper from a magazine and fold the plastic over it. It actually made it strong enough for us to link two strips together. We went on linking strips. I found that I had linked two consecutive strips the wrong way. My chain now had a bend. Without correcting my mistake, I continued and I was left with something that looked like the letter L. That's when Sony came up with the idea of making a photo frame out of the plastic bag chain that we had created.

Here's what our finished product looked like.

As it was pretty late that night by the time we were done, I was in no mood to fish out a photo that we could add there. We called our finished product a 'picture frame' instead. Sony wrote in it "Recycle and Reuse Plastics"!

A  couple of days later we made magazine coasters....yes, tea coasters made from old magazines. Will blog about it later. Am kind of sleepy right now. Hope you liked this picture frame.