Search

Finished Mat!

Kyle Fertig
Apr 2, 2017
2 min read

After over six months of work, the first mat has been completed! Over the last few weeks, we have been stopping by the church during free time to work on weaving the mat. When one ball of plarn runs low, it's very easy to attach the next ball onto the end. In total, about a six foot mat was weaved in about three hours of work! This testing was mostly done with three people. One person was on either side of the loom, while a third person was moving the front wall up and down. Removing the tied down ends of the mat fairly easy, and the ends were triple-tied because of how vital it is for them to stay in one piece. While the loom was designed to weave a 6.5' mat, in reality, the finished product was only about 6'. This can easily be fixed by creating additional middle pieces out of plywood for various, labeled lengths.

Two more issues found was that because plarn stretches, the mat caved inward in the middle during the weaving. While we tried our best to prevent this during weaving, there was a difference of almost six inches between the middle and sides. The other problem found was that the mat was not very compressed. While we were impressed for our first attempt and expected a less tight weave than the crocheted version, laying the mat on a wet surface would probably lead to water leaking through the holes. Both of these problems will be fixed in the future by using wire on the outside sections of string in conjunction with the actual plarn. The wire will prevent the inward bending, as well as allowing more compression. After the mat is finished, the wire can be pulled out as the ends are tied together.

The mat ended up weighing between 2.5 and 3 lb. Using samples of plastic bags, each usable section of an average plastic bag weighs about 4.8 grams. This means that with a less compressed mat, it takes between 240 and 290 bags to create one mat. About 70% each bag is usable material, meaning that there is a little over 1 lb of scrap plastic after each bag is made. Plastic can only be recycled one time, so there is significant scrap which will eventually end up in a landfill. Still, most plastic bags end up in a landfill anyways, so using this method should do more good than bad to the environment. The next step of the project will be testing the loom with wire, and beginning work on a machine to help cut the plastic bags to speed up the process of making plarn.