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Morsbags.......a simple, home made tote bag. Easy Project.

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 books that I picked up at the Gloucester Resource Centre and have been looking for a simple, straightforward project to use them in. So here's the result of a couple of hours sewing and pressing pattern samples after I had patchworked them together.

Back or is it the front?
Front or is it the back?

























The bag was made from 8 pattern samples which I overlocked together to form one piece of fabric of 2x4 samples. This was used to make the bag, loosely following the Morsbag instructions, but I used my overlocker to create the side seams before they were made into French seams. The handle came from a larger sample piece of the same fabric from the back of the sample book. The fabric is 100% polyester, medium weight furnishing fabric.
With a little lateral thinking, you too could make a Morsbag for next to nothing that will replace dozens of plastic carrier bags. It really is not difficult!


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