Sewing on and Serging forward

A few weeks ago I made my first foray into the world of making a lined Tote bag. I had some good quality medium weight cotton and some heavyweight poly/cotton material, both in shades of blue so I dived in. I wanted something a little more complicated to make than the Morsbag , so I turned to my copy of Merchant and Mills: Sewing Book  (which I highly recommend) for inspiration/a pattern. I went for their Tote Bag, which is a little more complex to make than your average "YouTube Tote Bag", having a 2" gusset, is fully lined and has a pocket. I stuck pretty rigidly to the pattern for the bag and lining, but omitted the inside pocket and made my own cloth straps from the outer fabric rather than add leather straps. The bag took a couple  of hours to make. I am very pleased with the results, so much so that I made a second on a few days ago, this one has webbing strap handles. This is a great large shopper and I am sure I will be making more in the future. Me...

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...

Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, we all make errors of judgement. With hindsight, I now realise that I made an error when I fitted a new motor to my Singer 99K. The motor should have gone onto my Singer 201K. Here is my reasoning, with the benefit of hindsight. Although my 99K was motor driven when I received it, the motor wiring was very dodgy so I removed it from the machine and replaced it with a hand crank. By the time the crank arrived the machine was working quietly following a thorough cleaning and oiling regime. With the crank installed their was a real improvement in the machine. But we can all do daft things. This was what I did. I fitted a new 0.45 watt YDK motor and pedal. What? That was just a replacement for the original motor that had seen better days. Whats wrong   with that, you may ask. Well, nothing really but it was not MY best option. Here's why. I had a hand cranked 99K, a hand cranked 201K and a new YDK motor and foot-pedal. My thoughts were to keep t...

Contrary to what Diane, my partner thinks, I am not a sewing machine collector. I do have two vintage Singers, a 99K Centennial edition from 1951 and a 201K dating back to 1940. I also have a Toyota Super Jeans 34, Toyota 3304 overlocker and Singer 14SH754 overlocker. All of these machines are "in use", meaning that they are not display only machines. All of them except for the Singer overlocker have been used in the past week! All have different strengths and weaknesses but I was beginning to feel that having two vintage machines, both hand cranked was more than a bit quirky. I definitely was trending towards putting an electric motor on one of them. The 99K would seem to be the ideal machine to remain hand cranked, being smaller and far more portable than the 201K, but as it originally had a Singer motor attached from new, I erred on the thought of replacing the crank on the 99K. For a little over £30 inc p & p I was able to obtain a brand new YDK  90w. 0.45 amp motor...

I seemed to be constantly busy during the last two weeks of April. I just seem to have been trying out new sewing projects, one after another. It began with making a tailor's ham, which then progressed to making a sleeve roll, then 10 rice filled pyramid pattern weights and a drawstring bag to keep the weights in. The ham was made on my Singer 99K, the sleeve roll. pattern weights and bag on my Singer 201K. Diane wanted me to make her a tool roll for some of her jewellery making tools. As I had recently taken apart an old leather skirt to re-used the leather, this seemed like a fitting project to make on my Singer 99K (using a leather needle). The roll was lined with felt that we got at the Gloucester Resource Centre. The most tricky project over the past couple of weeks was without a doubt the Office Party Bag from Debbie Shore. I chose to make this from some vinyl which I obtained through the Gloucester Resource Centre some weeks ago. As my first bag proje...