Heroic 'bag ladies' weave plastic bags into sleeping mats for homeless

The "bag ladies" meet every single week at to work their arthritis-ridden fingers for an amazing cause.

The women, who are mostly elderly members of Second Baptist Church in Union City, Tennessee, recycle discarded bags and by weaving them into sleeping mats for the homeless.

"This is not young ladies doing this. This is older ladies with the arthritis," volunteer Janice Akin told WGN TV in Chicago.

Each mat requires intricate work.

They cut and roll the bags they have collected into strips that they call "plarn" (plastic yarn), then crochet the strips into large rectangles, eventually taking the shape of a mat.

It takes 600 bags to make an 18 square foot mat. So far, this year, they have used 52,000 bags to make 88 mats, WGN reports.

Some of the bags were sent to Louisiana to help people who lost their homes to flooding.

"It's addictive. It gets to the point that you do two or three and you say, 'Hey, I'm actually making a difference in someone's life,' and you want to do more," Akin told WGN.

The group has doubled in size since they started this movement two years ago.