Cllr. Tony Harwood (Cabinet Member for Environment – Maidstone Borough) is keen to see the practise of shops giving out carrier bags stopped, and instead replaced with a reuseable “Maidstone bag”. Following some publicity in the papers with this, Pat Fyfe contacted all Borough Councillors to bring to our attention the “Mors bag” concept and to encourage us to advertise it widely.

The idea is that people arrange social events where everyone turns up, drinks a few glasses of wine (that’s what got me interested!) and makes reuseable bags out of leftover material, charity shop finds, old duvet covers etc. The bags are then given out to people with a little information about the idea. The estimate is that each one of these bags, reduces the need for around 500 plastic carrier bags.

The only extra thing you have to do when you’ve got one of these bags is get into the habit of taking it out with you. To quote the website, this is just like cleaning your teeth, only with less toothpaste…

What with Rachael being back at school full-time, but Ryan starting part-time this month (he’s now full time) and young baby, I haven’t had time to arrange anything. However, last night I had my first oppurtunity to sit down and make one of these bags. The bags are very strong. If you have even the most basic understanding of how a sewing machine works, they are also very easy to make.

At clothesmaking classes (started a fortnight ago) I’m making a beautiful (at least I hope it will be) denim skirt. All I’ve done so far is cut the material for my skirt, and because there was a fair bit left over, I’ve cut material for Rachael to have a dress too. Still there was some leftover and with this I made the bag.

From start to finish, it took me about an hour to iron, cut and sew the bag, but I’m sure can be done a lot faster. It took me a fair while to work out all the measurements and because I hadn’t done it before was a lot slower than necessary.

The link to the pattern and more information can be found here: www.morsbags.com. If you want to come round, drink wine and make these bags just let me know – The more the merrier….

While I was googling “Making bags” trying to find the morsbags wesite, I also discovered this from YouTube which is all about making bags out of old carriers. Next time I have some free time I might give this a go too…