Sewing on and Serging forward

I stumbled across the Morsbags website quite by accident, following a link from a Facebook group. Morsbags are homemade, group made, community made tote bags from a very simple design that will hopefully replace the use of plastic carriers and their horrific effect on the environment. Many Morsbag groups give their bags away! A Morsbag is very easy to make, requiring little knowledge of machine sewing, though some familiarity with a sewing machine will help a lot. The point is to take some otherwise junk fabric that is whole but destined for the bin and recycle it to a tote. Man-made fibres fabrics frequently end up in a landfill so the more they can be recycled the better. I don't intend to go into how to make a Morsbag, there are full instructions on how to do this on the Morsbag website here:  https://goo.gl/ttslls , inc patterns and a video. There are also a number of additional videos on YouTube that may be useful. I have a couple of fabric pattern sample bo...

A quick project that I did today was to make a Hussif which I found in the projects section of the Merchant & Mill "Sewing Book". A Hussif is a sewing roll of tools and thread inspired by the rolls that WW1 soldiers used to maintain their uniforms. My version, which is almost identical to the pattern in the "Sewing Book", holds a pair of small scissors, a tape measure, pack of Household needles, seam ripper, two pots of pins and two spools of heavy duty thread. The Hussif is not only a roll to store and protect the equipment, it also has a built-in pin cushion. As the Merchant and Mills pattern may be copyright, I have not included it here. I just need to find a couple of Tic-Tac boxes to hold the pins instead if the childproof "pill pots" which are a safe but a little on the chubby side.

I had a small frustration with my vintage sewing machines which I have now cured. When I sew using cross-wound thread, which is most of the time, I do not use the machines spool holder. It is designed to work with spools of stacked thread, like the old Sylko reels. I run my thread from a thread stand, which works in reducing any additional twist to the thread by pulling the thread off the spool from end, not the side. In theory, it works great but in practice, I hit a snag. The spool stand is tall, with the thread stand guide arm being 3-4 inches higher than the spool pin on the machine. Most of the time there is no issue with this, especially if I am sewing at slow to medium pace, but if I pick up speed the thread has a tendency to jump out of the first thread guide on the machine. I find this happens on both my 201K and 99K machines. What causes the problem is that the thread goes slack if I take my foot off the gas. There is nothing to stop the thread flap...