My group and I made plastic string out of regular plastic water bottles. We got the idea to make this from a website selling plastic bottle cutters for $25. Instead of wasting $25 on this project we wanted to make our own version that is practically free.

Step 1: Gather Materials

The first thing you have to do is to gather the materials needed for this project.

The materials needed are:

8 washers
1 piece of plywood( 3” by 2”)
1 small pencil sharpener
Hot glue gun
Hot glue
Several plastic bottles
Screwdriver

Step 2: Make the Plastic String Machine

To make the string-making machine, you must take the pencil sharpener and, using the screwdriver, take the sharpener’s sharp cutting edge out of it. After you have that sharp edge, glue one end of it in between two washers and the other end in another two washers. Then, glue two more washers underneath each of the first two sets of washers that are on each side. Glue this piece onto the plywood (or you can even glue it or screw it onto a table to keep it from moving at all). This is your completed plastic bottle string machine.

Step 3: Make the Plastic String

After you have the machine, you can make the string. To prepare the bottles to be made into string, you want to cut the bottom about where the line is on the bottom of the bottle. If you do a bad job cutting, you can always clean it up with scissors. If you can’t seem to get the cutter to cut through the bottle, try cutting an angled cut on the bottle so that the cutter can latch on.

When you are cutting, you always want to cut on an upwards angle so the string won’t break, and you need to be very gentle and patient with the string, too. You do not cut the top part of the bottle because it won’t provide good, strong string.

Step 4: What to Do When You're Finished

That's all you have to do to get this sturdy plastic string from a plastic bottle. When you finish collecting the string, you can do anything you want with it. We created a funky hat out of an old hat (but any hat will do if you want to recreate this) and several pieces of plastic string. To make the hat, simply bring the string through one of the hat’s holes and tie them on the inside of the hat. This ensures that the string doesn’t fall, and the hat looks pretty nice.

In conclusion, we had a lot of fun with this project, and even though we weren’t completely successful with the string (it kept breaking), we believe our end product was indeed successful, and that we made the best product that we could make.