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.

Back in late summer 2015, I purchased a Toyota 3304 overlocker, second hand for my partner Diane to use in her crafting endeavours. It was eighteen months old, in immaculate condition and the most basic model that Toyota made at the time. That's it in the photo, with a small addition that I will come to in a future post. Now if I had known more about overlockers (or sergers as they are called in the USA), I may have thought  twice about buying the Toyota 3304 which is a basic 3 or 4 thread overlocker with very little in the way of bells and whistles. It lacks a differential feed function, it requires an optional needle plate and presser foot to create rolled hems, there is no two thread overlock option on this machine. If I had followed the internet pundits who seem to praise a few "well known" brands and models, you know the ones, I would not have considered a Toyota machine, but that would have been a big mistake, as I have found out. I am like a lot of men. Give...