I’ve seen a couple of tutorials on the web explaining how to fuse plastic bags together by ironing them, and I wanted to give it a go. Trouble was, there are all kinds of plastic bags. There are the thin ones you get from the supermarket, and thick ones from clothing stores. There are a flexible ones and crinkly ones and ones in between. Did they all work the same way? Because the type I tend to accumulate are the thicker ones.

My mother has a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens, and once she’s finished with an issue she passes it to me. I’ve noticed that a few months after a craft idea hits the web it turns up in the magazine. So it was with the plastic bag fusing. The up side to this was that the instructions were a bit more detailed. Not only did it confirm that I could use my bag stash, but around what temperature to set the iron.

Even so, I started with the smaller bags, which I find I don’t reuse as much as the larger ones. I cut them up and trimmed them to a similar size:

Apparently if you have any printing on the outside it ‘makes a mess’ so I put a plain blue one on one side and reversed a printed one on the other in the hopes that it would show through in an appealing way.

Some cheap paper I’d kept from within IKEA furniture packaging was perfect for protecting the ironing board and iron. I set the iron to ‘wool’ as suggested in BH&G and got ironing. After a few minutes going over the bags slowly they fused enough that the layers didn’t separate. The thinner printed bag bubbled in one spot from overheating, but a quick press got it to stick flat again.

I was satisfied with the result. The piece of fused plastic is thinner than a piece of leather of that rigidity would be. The surface has a nice rippled texture. I think it’ll make a good wrap-around water-resistant book cover.

Reversing the printed bag isn’t something I’d do again deliberately. It’s not particularly visible and, well, it’s reversed. It would be better to place a clear plastic bag on top. I happen to have one plain clear shopping bag, but there are plenty of other sources of clear plastic around the house. Photo enlargements arrive from the developer in plastic sleeves. Zip lock bags are used and reused a lot around here. Yesterday Paul received a parcel with clear plastic bags used as packing, so I grabbed some of that to try as well.

Because I have some plastic bags that I’ve kept as souvenirs and other that have nice designs, and if I can fuse them without ruining the printing, they would make fabulous book covers.