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Thank you Tori! We had the usual mix of speedy sewers and absolute novices, plus all abilities and experience in between. Altogether a super weekend 🙂
I forgot to tell you – we made 65 bags on five sewing machines on Saturday! That was working very hard, with a queue almost the whole day.
Today (Sunday) we made 47 bags on four machines as Minke had to retire “injured”, but Frank hopes to sort him out before we hand them on.
This is the first pulse of customers arriving at 9.30 – look at the beautiful blue sky. It lasted all day.
Early on we had a nice surprise – a lady arrived with a morsbag already in her handbag. She’d been given it by a friend in Bristol who’d been bagged a little while ago and had asked for one for a friend – her!
The interesting things about this bag are that
1) It came with a leaflet that said it had been made by Offcuts pod
and
2) It doesn’t have a sewn-on label, the same info and logo has been stamped onto a plain part of the bag. Looks great, hope it’s washable.
Just round the corner from us today they were holding free pompom making workshops – our customers started arriving wearing pompom crowns or tiaras. 😀 They didn’t have to queue, participants who couldn’t fit in the tent just sat outside in the sunshine, winding away, lovely!
I’d like to thank the team at The Handmade Fair who made it possible for us to participate this weekend. We had a wonderful and productive weekend. And I’d also like to thank the two Austrian ladies, mother and daughter, who came and watched, then returned and made their bags. They came to see us as they were leaving and we were packing up, to say that they enjoyed their time sewing with us the best of the whole day. Now that’s the sort of thing that keeps us going 🙂 Thank you for saying thank you!
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This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by
beattie.
On Friday afternoon we drove to the lovely estate of Bowood House, somewhat appalled by the queues and traffic jams around Trowbridge on the way. Having got through them, things improved and we arrived just before the first day of the show closed. After the previous users of our lovely little marquee had packed up we spent an hour or so getting settled in. I draped bunting, made up an information panel and hung up our trusty M-O-R-S-bags, while Himself sorted out the electrical arrangements and other technicalities.
Saturday dawned bright and fair, we rose unusually early (for us..) and returned to the Handmade Fair in much better traffic, to finish getting things ready.
After that, things got a bit lively!
We had a lovely surprise about mid-morning – who should turn up but Wendy and Mike of Macs Bags! We were very pleased to see them, and they generously came back a bit later and gave us a quick lunch break each. Well that was a delightful treat, as I was expecting to have to last all day on a small pack of crackers.
The only other photos I took are from the last couple of needle-persons as we were too busy to snap any before that.
Bronwen is thinking about starting a pod – we enjoyed our chat
and I forgot to ask this lady’s name, but she was thrilled with the bag she made as it happened to be an exact match for her aged granny’s sofa covers and brought back fond memories. What a lovely connection.
I’m just working on the photos Tori, gotta remember my flickr.com password….
Congratulations, by the way, to all in your pod, Chickadeez (and friends). I’ve just seen that you’ve passed the thousand-bags-made mark! Well done all the chickadeez 😀
Thanks for the enquiry Jan. I don’t know the answer at the moment, but will flag your enquiry for Joe. I’ve had a look at one of my pods and can see that it’s not obvious, a little peek behind the scenes gives the same result. Sorry, dunno! I am confident Joe will be able to help though! 🙂
Hare and Boathouse! Canterbury Food Bank!
I am so pleased to come home from a holiday and find that you are now located on the map in your correct (so far as I can tell) positions! 😀
Congratulations to you – and a big round of applause for Joe, Techmaster-in-chief!Hello Maysiedee! I’m very sorry about the long delay between your generous offer and my reply. Unfortunately the amount of spam we get means that all posts have to be moderated these days and you posted on the morning we left for a two week holiday.
However, here we are back again, and I’m sure that a morsbagger somewhere will be able to use your unwanted material. Whereabouts are you?
Hi Jen, yes, do make modifications if you like. We find that shoulder bags with long straps are quite popular. I also sometimes make bags with extra short handles – popular with the less tall. For children I find slightly smaller bags are good – about 15″ wide works well, and correspondingly shorter. We try to make the best use of the material and if that means that they are a bit varied that’s just fine! I find “Beach bag” shaped bags that are wider than they are deep and with long handles are popular too – just go with the flow.
If you want some variation, I have a few really GIANT bags that I take when buying loo rolls or kitchen rolls (or big Lego sets for Christmas presents), or on holidays to contain laundry. As long as it is made out of reused or repurposed fabric, has a morsbags label on it, is used instead of a plastic bag and is given away free (or used by the maker!) it counts as a morsbag.
Re the polypropylene tape you ask about, we’ve used it, but find it hard to find wide enough. It’s very hard and tends to cut into the hands or shoulders of the bag user unless you find a wide one, and it tends to break sewing machine needles. Himself (who also makes morsbags) comments that you don’t want it to be too thick (as opposed to wide…) as it is more likely to break needles when it is thick and is hard to bend upwards into position when sewing across the handle so it points up out of the bag.
On the plus side, it does save sewing up lots of handles and is almost indestructible. Also comes in lots of jolly colours.Hi Jen. I love your name! Magic Flying Boots – yes please, I’ll have some of them. 🙂
I’m sorry it’s taken a while to see your question and reply to it – I’ve been away and I think you posted just after I’d left.
I guess, when it comes down to it pods are the way you add your bags onto everyone else’s and increase the global tally.
I see it as being part of a bigger organisation and through that gaining more strength.Someone who hears about morsbags so sits down and makes some bags to use themselves or give away is doing something that’s a little bit useful, but as I see it, if that person hears about morsbags, registers a pod, gets some morsbags labels, makes and gives away labelled bags and adds them on to the tally, they’ve made them count a bit more.
Together we are stronger. As I see it, using a reusable bag is a good step to take, but making, using and giving away morsbags wins on more fronts – repurposing unwanted fabric that would otherwise end up in landfill, reducing the use of plastic and becoming part of a global campaign that is finally becoming louder and stronger.
I hope your labels have arrived by now – have you started sewing?
Guggles is a dialect name for snails 😀
That’s wonderful Agwen! I love seeing bags I and people I know carried round our small town too. 😀 Makes me very happy. Morsbags are so durable.
Sometimes I see them in the wild too – and the one with hand-made label was given out at our first hand-out, during a postal strike. Our first label order was stuck in a sorting office somewhere, so when I realised they weren’t going to arrive in time I sat up til about 3am the night before, hand writing lots of pieces of white sheet and sewing them onto the finished bags. There were seventy-something of them….
March was looking pretty good before Harborough Hit Bags added their big increment Em, now it’s looking even better! ‘m looking forward to posting about it in just over a week. 😀
Hello Hare and Boathouse! I’m sorry your location is not correct. The position you describe is the default when a location is not recognised. The map function has not worked well for some time – I think it might be overloaded!
I’ll draw your post to Joe’s attention, he’s the webmaster, but I think they have a lot of other things on their plates to be dealing with just now. Fingers crossed he’ll be able to fix it for you.
I’m laughing, Tracy! I love skewed figures – I just saw you’d added lots and was really pleased to see them. March is already shaping up to be another bumper month for new pods, and lots of bags made too.
Great job with and by the Guides! Have fun using your new morsbags girls 😀
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This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by