The journey of plastic bags: from scourge to art

My process feels like the journey of plastic bags: from nefarious scourge that we are embarrassed to admit we have in our closet, to a very flexible building material that has been the foundation of my art for the past few years. My studio mate gave me all his plastic bags, a collection of a few months. I took photos of this treasure and documented the journey.

The first step is the sorting process. I sort by color and/or logo. Some logos are so recognizable that I set them aside, for example the Smiley Face logo on a lot of bags gets sorted by itself.

The pile of Bravo Supermarket bags at the lower left corner of the photo here had about 24 bags. It took almost 2 hours to cut all the bags in long strips. Here's the pile:

The next fun step is to roll this giant pile into a workable ball of yarn:

A few days later, with some orange, white and brown: