Fused plastic flowers

At the May Bath Artisan Market, the theme was Bath in Bloom, and all the stall-holders had been asked to decorate their stalls with a floral theme.

Now, obviously the easy thing to do for my Make It Better…Upcycle Exchange stall, would have been to go out and buy some flowers, or to dig something pretty up from the garden. BUT I still haven’t made my mind up about where buying ‘new’ flowers fits in to the whole Make Do and Mend Year, and I we have very little pretty in our garden at the moment….

So I decided to make some. And I thought it would be a clever idea to try and Upcycle some (in keeping with the stall), so this is what I made.

They are flowers (well, vaguely flower shaped…) made from fused plastic bags.
I had read about fusing plastic bags before, but never got around to trying it, and then saw some bunting

that the lovely people at FoodCycle were making at the Oxfam Craft Tea Party, and got the lowdown from them on how to do it.
It really is very easy.  And once you have fused the plastic bags, you can cut them to whatever shape you want!

This is what you need:

• plastic bags-thin supermarket type ones
• an iron and ironing board
• greaseproof paper
• scissors

This is what you do:

• Cut a line across the top of the bag to cut the handles off, and then cut a strip off the bottom to enable you to open it out without it being all scrunched up
• Line up the side seams and neaten the bag up so there aren’t lots of creases in it
• Do this with 3 bags and lay them on top of each other on your ironing board

I should add that this post ISN’T sponsored by Morrisons-other supermarkets are available….

• Place a sheet of greaseproof at the bottom of your pile (in between the ironing board and your bags) and another one on top
• Iron! I did it on a medium-ish setting, and just made sure I kept the iron moving. All the layers of plastic bag should then fuse together

This picture looks very similar to the one above, but they have actually fused!

• Then cut out whatever shape like-triangles for bunting, flowers for, well, flowers…I have also seen people do squares for coasters. Go crazy….

I then cut rough circles out of this left over party bag to make the flower centres

And sewed the whole lot together

And I did one big giant one to hang behind the stall too:

And they can be recycled afterwards too-Happy Days 🙂