The blog formerly known as   Fake Plastic Fish

April 1, 2011

Art of Zen Crocheted Produce Bags

 

Art of Zen Crochet produce bags

Chriss from Art of Zen Crochet makes gorgeous produce sacks out of hemp yarn. Check out her site. Her scarves and other crocheted items are fantastic. The produce sacks are extremely light weight and great for getting your produce weighed without a plastic bag.

Art of Zen Crochet produce bags

Just keep them away from kitties who like to play with yarn. Which is pretty much all kitties, right?

Art of Zen Crochet produce bags

Chriss writes:

Sometimes you have to takes things apart before putting them together.

Growing up on the West Coast of Canada, on Vancouver Island exploring the beaches, mountains, and woods has given me inspiration all my life in order to create.

My shop being as environmentally friendly as possible is really important to me! Right down to using scraps of yarn for tagging items, to my shipping materials. My yarns are all chosen with the health of the planet and people wearing them in mind. When I dye my yarns I use fiber reactive dyes that do not harm the environment. Quality, I want the items I create to last for many years to come.

 

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Easyaspie
12 years ago

A new law has been passed, saying it is illegal to walk around with a red, green, or yellow shirt at streets, for drivers have accidentally mistaken it as the stoplight in the town of Dizzy, Texas. Enjoy!

Diane Hudson
12 years ago

My mum once served boiled eggs for breakfast and it wasn’t until we took the lids off we realised they were empty. She had saved them from a previous brekkie and just re-heated them and put them in the cups upside down. One of my favourite memories about Mum.

Dmarie
12 years ago

guess I’m too late for the giveaway, but love those bags!

Fr. Peter
12 years ago

I am an ex engineer / race car driver (sorry Beth, but it was a long time ago) and recently received this email from a ‘friend’.

“Natural Collection are offering the ‘all new eco-friendly car turbine’ costing only 299.95. According to the advert the system can achieve over 300mpg and use your own generated wind power (rear turbines) with a self-install system. The rear turbines are said to gather over 6000pW of renewable energy which look to me like wind power turbines on the back of the car. There are also turbines installed in the front bumper grille. Has anyone heard of this system before or know anything about it? ”

Sure had me going as my mind immediately started to visualise the concept and my fingers were quickly typing in the website link… then the date on my on-screen calendar leapt out and hit me.

Always good to know that I am not alone in the ‘One Born Every Minute Competition’.

Pam
12 years ago

I mixed gelatin in glasses of milk one year (the night before) for my kids. In the morning I set a nice breakfast out for them, along with the altered milk. They were so impressed with the breakfast (Mom usually doesn’t fix them a breakfast, they are old enough to fix one themselves), that they didn’t want to say anything to me about the milk…they thought it had “gone bad”. I still chuckle when I think about it. I think the April Fool’s was on me…

Moira
12 years ago

My friend from Sweden told me that when they switched from driving on the left to the right hand side of the road, to avoid confusion they had the trucks start doing it a week early and then the cars the next week. I’m pretty gullible and believed him for about 10 seconds….

behan
12 years ago

I work at a digital agency, who mocked up and posted to their blog an excellent fake of a new product from Apple: a gesture-driven (no remote control)TV. I think you get to claim “gotcha” when gizmodo picks it up!

I’m pretty sure that using store bags for produce is the single biggest source of single-use plastic in my life… I would love to kick that habit! Thanks, Beth, for all your inspiration. These are beautiful- are there other sources “out there” you can share?

Brenda
12 years ago

I nearly brought my coworker to tears this year when I “April Fooled” her. I’ve only been with my company for about 3 1/2 months so I didn’t think it would matter much if I lied and said that I had decided to leave my job. She loves to tease me so I was excited to get her back. I never expected for her to take it to heart. Her face dropped and she almost started crying. I immediately told her it was a joke and thankfully she didn’t hit me! I learned an important lesson though. Never underestimate you worth to your coworkers and leave the April Fool’s jokes to the professionals!!

Bryant
12 years ago

Beautiful bags! VegNews posted that Paula Deen was going vegan. I believed it for a few minutes and was so excited! :)

Jessie
12 years ago

These are all too funny! The only successful April Fools prank I can recall is the morning I poured about 1/2 of a salt shaker into my dad’s coffee while he wasn’t looking. I can still see the look on his face as he spit it across the room!

Jennifer Kanehl
12 years ago

I have to say it would be when I told my hubby that we were expecting baby no 4. He totally fell for it, and all the blood went out of his face! He looked like he wanted to faint. :) Those are beautiful bags, love them!

Michael Nolan
12 years ago

These are incredible!

k
12 years ago

April Fools Joke…hmmm…
Personally I haven’t come up with any good ones but I did see one floating around the internets of bike parking ticketing. A bicyclist in Portland did not pay his parking fees so he got the boot!

sharonus
12 years ago

I love the Google ones. Especially the guy who has a job at Google as an autocompleter and types 37k words a minute!

EcoCatLady
12 years ago

Wait, wait… I get it… you’re keeping the bags for yourself, right? April Fools!

Nancy
12 years ago

I thought I was too old for April Fool’s pranks….but this year I decided to rubber band the kitchen sink sprayer located next to the faucet and soak my kids. Unfortunately (or not!) it was my husband dressed for work who turned on the kitchen sink water and ended up soaked:) Love those bags and would love a tutorial on how to make them, too!

Sara M.
12 years ago

Being from the Chicago area, this one caught my attention about five years ago. Walter E. Smithe, a furniture company, played a bunch of commercials in late March, 2006, saying that they had bought Wrigley Field and were going to rename it. I totally fell for it – I was so mad when I first heard about it! You can’t change the name of Wrigley! This is from the Walter E. Smithe Wikipedia page:

“One of Walter E. Smithe’s most discussed commercials aired in late March 2006. The spot showed the brothers at a news conference announcing that they had purchased Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, with plans to rename it Walter E. Smithe Field. The commercial included the tagline “Change the Name, Change the Luck”, a reference to the Cubs’ decades-long struggle to reach the World Series. It also featured an appearance by Dutchie Caray, wife of the late Cubs announcer Harry Caray.”

Convincing, no? I was relieved when I found out it was just a April Fool’s prank. Yes, I care that much about the name of a baseball stadium. :)

Joke
12 years ago

If you press the ctrl, alt, cmd and 8-key on a mac, all the colors on the screen are reversed (black becomes white, red becomes green etc). I did that once to the brand spanking new laptop of a friend and he freaked out and thought something was wrong with his computer :)
Yesterday we did the same to a friend in our dorm and also left a background image with our scary faces. Winnnnnn! :)

Mary Ann
12 years ago

Once our local paper which only comes out once a week and this particular week it was on April Fools Day had a full page feature of the Avro Arrow being found in a barn in our neck of the woods. (The Avro Arrow was an airplane specially designed and was still in testing stages for our country’s protection. There was a huge political debate and then the government literally scrapped all of the planes which were manufactured and all of the drawings and blueprints so they couldn’t be made anymore. It was all political and its a big sore in Canada’s political history.)

In this newspaper story it was told that one was stolen before it got scrapped and somehow it was found in an old barn in Muskoka. They even had a picture of it in the barn and it was very well photo shopped. A believeable story and it wasn’t until the end you found out it was an April Fools joke.

Kristy
12 years ago

far out! There’s some NUTS April Fool’s Day jokes out there, and some very game people! lol I have enough trouble working out what day it is without having to remember to play jokes on people too – that I would probably not feel so good about after… although I guess they don’t have to be THAT full on.

Off to check out these bags :) Thanks for the link.

Jamie Brown
12 years ago

I don’t have any really awesome stories and I actually really dislike April Fools for the most part. But my favorite ones are the silly ones my children attempt to do. For example, last night as I sit at my computer with no shoes on, just socks, my son comes up and says “oh mom, your shoe is untied” and I have to glance down in surprise and giggle as he says “April Fools!”. I knew of course that I wasn’t wearing shoes but he was so happy to try to get one over on me!

Melissa
12 years ago

I didn’t realize until just now, when reading through other people’s April Fool’s Day stories, that the Playmobil Apple Store I saw on Facebook today was a joke! I didn’t know I was so guilable! I definitely had an idea of someone who would love a set like that, good thing I didn’t try to buy it as a gift!

Happy April Fool’s Day!

I’d love to try and learn how to make these bags, I make reusable fabric gift bags but maybe I need to learn to crochet next!

Jill
12 years ago

I have falled for this prank for I don’t know how many years now. My daughter will tape the lever on the sprayer on the kitchen sink to engage the spray when the main faucet is turned on. She uses scotch tape or sometimes will tightly wrap cellophane tape around it so you can’t see it. The unsuspecting victim never looks at the sprayer when they go to wash their hands, they look at the faucet knob…and then LOOK OUT, water comes right at you! Never fails, I always forget to look. Happened today, too! UGH!

Ruby
12 years ago

Things were a little slow around the rehab hospital today so the day charge nurse decided to play a joke on the oncoming night charge nurse. When the night charge was walking down the hallway the day charge grabbed the code cart and ran down the hallway into an emply room. The night charge nurse started running after her and we all heard her scream of surprise when she realized the “code” was an April Fools Joke! I was left explaining to patients and their family members nearby that it was just hospital humor.

Margo
12 years ago

The ONLY reason I look forward to April Fool’s Day is to hear what Marketplace (from American Public Media) is going to play for their Fool’s Story. One year it was about the gov’t requiring health insurance for pets.

This year’s story can be found at. . .

Carmen
12 years ago

In ninth grade I was a very quiet and shy person…The class was Geography…I decided to pass a note in class that said look at the footprints on the ceiling…Of course as I passed it I said pass it on…Every single kid in class read the note…Looked at the ceiling and realized they had been had…The giggles got louder as each person read and looked…Finally the teacher realized something was up and intercepted the note….Yes he looked up and yes the class totally lost it…Somehow he found out much later it had been me and change my pass back to school as truant…That one was hard to bear…LOL

eRin H
12 years ago

I loved Martha Stewart’s April Fool’s show a few years back. She pretended to poke herself in the eye with a needle, fell to the floor and stood back up with a “bloody” hankie to her face. Her staff flipped out and tried to hurry her offstage until she started cracking up and said April Fools. It probably wouldn’t have been funny except she is always so proper that it was unexpected.

Pheas
12 years ago

I sent a set of these to my favorite anti-plastic blogger, even though I’m pretty sure she doesn’t have a car:

http://carlashes.com/

Maybe you can stick’em on a BART car, Beth! ;)

Loribird
12 years ago

I’ve played and succumbed to many April Fool’s Day pranks in my lifetime, but one of the very best was the one I fell for this morning.

A local man here on my island keeps a blog, the “Ocracoke Island Journal.” Here is today’s post:
https://villagecraftsmen.blogspot.com/2011/04/nps-announcement.html
I was completely fooled!

Laura A
12 years ago

I heard a great fake news story about food advertisements in and on the food (coupons inside ice cream, etc.). It had me going for a while- what else would you expect from the same industry that produces Lunchables and other single-serving disposable items pretending to be food? But when they got to the part about the pickle picture waving from the cooking hamburger I knew it was too weird even for people who eat Lunchables.

This was on the show “Marketplace” from American Public Media.

stacie tamaki
12 years ago

I loved the Whole Foods home page from a year or two ago when they had a new in store feature called “Burn it to Earn it.” Customers had to work out on a treadmill or step machine before they were allowed to purchase goods from the bakery. It was pretty funny.

Beth
12 years ago

My only (because it didn’t end well) April Fool’s joke:

My mom and got back from a party, told my Dad the car had a flat tire. He went out to fix it. after a few minutes I went out to tell him “April Fools!” but missed the doorknob and stuck my arm through the window in the door, cutting it to the bone.

My mom raced me outside saying to my father “we have to go to the hospital immediately” to which my father responded (because he believed it) “we can’t; the car has a flat tire.” (we eventually convinced him, and I still have my arm .. .)

Laura
12 years ago

This one made me laugh a lot. http://bit.ly/efzSpB

Roz Graham
12 years ago

When I lived in Britaqin the BBC did a news bit showing the spaghetti trees in Italy. They did other one’s too but the spaghetti one is all I remember.
My Grandmother used to crochet vegie bags and I would love to have one, in her memory.

Eva
12 years ago

Yesterday (April 1 here in Aus) tmy sister texted her best mate, telling him that she wasn’t going to be able to run the marathon that they had planned to do together and would have to forfeit the fee, airfares,etc, because her ex husband couldn’t look after her son that weekend.
She expected to receive a nervous breakdown and angst ridden reply. ( she’s mean, by the way!).
instead, he came up with all sorts of solutions and problems solving ideas in a lovely giving, caring way.
She felt rather embarrassed!
Eva

Rhonda Rogalski
12 years ago

A couple of years ago my grandmother installed new pale peach carpet in her bedroom and sitting area. My brother being the feisty guy that he is decided he just had to play a joke on her for daring to put such light colored carpet in her house. He created fake spilled coffee using paint and craft paper. He set the overturned mug with it’s large puddle of coffee right in the middle of the floor. My grandmother let out a shriek that could wake the dead when she saw it. She did relax when she found out it was a joke, but she remembers it to this day.

The funniest thing is that I just received my daily craft e-mail from Martha Stewart today and it was a tutorial on making fake spilled coffee!!!!

Happy April Fool’s Day everyone :D

Lily
12 years ago

Well, my uncle really likes computers. He had just bought a new one before April Fool’s. So, By grandpa decided he was going to put a broken screen screen saver on. My uncle walked into the den and went crazy. “My brand-new computer screen is broken! Who dropped it? Tell me who did it!” My grandpa fessed up. We all had a good laugh.

Lily
12 years ago

My sister’s birthday is on April Fool’s day. One year as a little kid, I decided to turn all the drawers in her desk upside down. Ummm…. She wasn’t happy.

melanie Smith
12 years ago

I have never really been into April fool’s jokes, My little sister was born on April 1st. So since that’s her birthday we don’t do jokes, but gifts and a party. We call it spring day in my own family, my 3 year old little girl wanted to wear flowers on her clothes today, and she walked around singing happy birthday to her aunty J ( even though we are states apart) she called her aunty J on Facetime to sing to her. I would love to win a bag, they are so cute. Thanks

Dana
12 years ago

I told the kids in my class we were going on a field trip….to the moon. I changed my birthday to today (on FB). I NEVER give my kids soda and I filled their water bottles with sprite.

The Army announced that it’s going to make all soldiers wear stetsons. Google has a virtual no-typing required interface “google move”. Think Geek has a ton of horribly cheesy products that dont’ really exist (thank goodness!)

Alison
12 years ago

ooooh! I love the caramel onion idea! Ha! I am going to save that…my favorite April Fool jokes always involve food. I’ve made and served dirt dessert on several occasions, but the best time was the first.

My dad is a complete neat freak and germ-a-phobe, so on April Fools day in high school I helped my mom with dinner and made a dirt dessert in a clean new flower pot that I filled with the “dirt” and freshly washed silk flowers. My mom was in on it, but kept quiet. When it came time for dessert I stuck a spoon in the pot plopped it on my plate and started to it, mean while my dad started to sputter and finally yelled, “stop!” He was totally confused and quiet worked up. Fortunately he also has an excellent sense of humor, so it all turned out well in the end. It was awesome.

Jessica
12 years ago

Today my professor, who is a very serious and conservative scholar from England, welcomed us to class and said that she wasn’t sure if she should stick to the lesson plan or cover the information from our last test. She had graded half of our tests, but no one had yet passed. Every student in the class stared at her, completely silent.

Then she smiled slyly, saying in the same serious tone, “I’ve always loved April Fools, especially when it falls on a day I have lessons.”

Kat
12 years ago

Where I work, people regularly put out open packages of cookies, nuts, chips, snacks, etc for everyone to eat. One of our co-workers MO was to eat and eat and eat until it was all gone.

Last April Fools Day, another co-worker of mine put out those Trader Joe’s Doggie peanut butter treats/cookies. They were in a package similar to Joe-Joe’s (like Oreo’s) and looked A LOT like PB cookies. TJ’s only sold them for a short time. He announced over the PA that there were “cookies in the back room”. In all fairness, the package was open, but there and if you just glanced at the package you could see that they were pet treats. Anyway, the other guy immediately headed back there and chowed down. Everyone was laughing. I was busy and only realized what had happened as the joke as ending (I probably wouldn’t have been able to let him eat them if I had known). But, on the other hand, I’ll bet now he actually looks at the label of what he’s going to eat…. BTW – I think the Johnson & Johnson prank was awesome!

kanmuri
12 years ago

I’m a corporate travel agent and this morning a supervisor call me telling me that one of my VIP clients was stranded in an airport in the US, having missed his connection. He then said that our emergency service hadn’t been able to find a hotel nor another flight and that the client was quite pissed. I took it all in, asking for the file number, trying to think of way to think this. The supervisor then sent me the file number by email… email which red APRIL’S FOOL!!!

He did the same thing to two other agents, one of which really freaked out and also to our main accountant, telling him he had only gotten 150$ on his pay check.

Needless to say, he caught us all!

Erin
12 years ago

An April Fool’s joke that I thought was really funny when I was a kid happened at a large 4-H gathering. There were 4 caramel apples that we were going to give to some adults as some kind of thank you but one was actually an onion inside. All the kids were laughing hysterically as the 1 adult bit into the onion expecting an apple.

Lynn
12 years ago

I’ve been taking care of my poor son who has been sick with the flu all day…until he said “April Fools”. Little rat was faking it!

Melanie
12 years ago

Well, I have never been an April Fool’s Day fan myself, but I think the Lady Gaga one was one of the best! It was believable because you are such an open and honest person but hillarious because it was unexpected!

kristy ot
12 years ago

Just about the only April Fool’s Day jokes I like are the annual fake products on ThinkGeek’s front page. My favorite this year: gummy iphone case.

Kate
12 years ago

One year on the last day of March back when I was in college, the cops came to my apartment looking for a previous tenant. The next day(April Fool’s Day) I called my parents and told them that I had a run in with the police and needed some money. There was a long silence on the other end of the line before the guilt of the joke got to me and I blurted out “April Fool’s”. I think they were to startled to even laugh.

Nat Huck
12 years ago

Switch your kids drawers around in the dressers. Switching the cereal into different boxes or containers. And the most classic and worst one ever… take all the labels off the canned goods.