If Flossie can find new ways to reuse old things, so can we.

Flossie collects grocery bags, clean garbage bags and any other plastic bag she can find. Then she crochets the bags into hats. And doormats. And small rugs. And placemats. And anything else she can think of.

"All in my head," said Flossie, pointing to the side of her noggin.

She uses black bags and white bags, purple bags and blue bags, pink bags and yellow bags.

All day long, every day, Flossie Matthews cuts the bags into strips and presses the strips flat.

"Continuously, she never stops," said Cindy Runyan, activities director at Yorktowne Village.

"Nonstop," said Emily Moss, another activities worker.

Flossie, with a touch of "the arth-uritis" in her fingers, ties the strips together and pulls out her old crochet needles and knits. She sells the hats for $5 and the bigger rugs for $10 and small stuff for $2. A big item can take a week or more.

"But I give away a lot more than I ever sell," Flossie said. "Last place I lived, I had my own apartment. Everybody there got a doormat. My doormats were in front of every door."

Read the entire Charlotte Observer article, by Andrew Dys, here.

For those of you eager to crochet some plastic yourself, or for those curious about what plastic crocheted items look like, here's a video from Saginaw, Mich., where uses her crochet hook to repurpose plastic: