Our counter says 635,421 morsbags. We’re fairly sure that’s wrong — and wrong in the nicest possible way.
Every bag on that counter was logged by a pod. That’s the deal: a pod makes bags, a podmin adds them to the tally, and the number on the front page goes up. It’s a lovely system, and it has one enormous blind spot. It can only count the people who told us.
So we went digging through the thirteen years of labels sales records we have to work out how big that blind spot might be. The answer surprised us.
Part one: the label buyers with nowhere to log
A bag isn’t really a morsbag until it has a label sewn in — that’s the bit that turns a homemade tote into a small piece of a global campaign. Labels cost about 5p. We’ve sold roughly 591,000 of them since our shop records begin in December 2013.
Here’s the thing. 4,855 people have bought morsbag labels. Of those, 3,108 — very nearly two in three — are not in a pod at all. Not an owner, not a member, nothing.
Between them, those pod-less buyers have bought about 235,000 labels. That’s around 40% of every label we’ve ever sold, sitting in sewing boxes and kitchen drawers, going into bags that our counter has never seen.
Not because anyone did anything wrong. Most people found the pattern, liked the idea, bought some labels, and started sewing — and never realised there was a map to put themselves on.
Part two: the ones we can’t even estimate
And that’s just the people who bought labels from us.
The morsbags pattern has always been free. Anyone can download it. Print it, photocopy it, pass it round a sewing group. Labels get handed out in bundles at craft fairs and school fêtes. Someone’s mum makes twenty bags for the village hall. A WI group runs a morsbags afternoon. A teacher does it with a class of thirty. A friend shows a friend, who shows a friend.
None of that touches our shop. None of it touches a pod. We have absolutely no way of counting it — and we suspect it’s bigger than the part we can measure, not smaller.
We’ve started calling them ghost morsbags. Real bags, doing real work, replacing real plastic — completely invisible to us.
So: how many do you reckon?
This is the bit where we need you, because honestly we’re guessing too.
Our counter says 635,421. What’s the real number? Double? Five times? Ten? If you’ve been part of this for years, you’ll have a better instinct than any spreadsheet we can build.
And a few questions we’d genuinely love answered in the comments:
- Are you a ghost? Have you made morsbags — one, or a hundred — without ever registering a pod? (No telling-off, we promise. We just want to know how many of you there are.)
- Do you know one? A sewing group, a school, a neighbour, a church hall crowd who’ve been quietly churning bags out for years?
- How many bags do you think you’ve personally made? Ballpark is fine. Nobody’s counting — that’s rather the point.
If you’d like to stop being a ghost
It takes about a minute, and it makes the number on the front page a bit less of a lie:
- Find a pod near you — search your town on the map at morsbags.org/pods. We’ve just opened official pods in 39 towns where we found lots of label buyers and no local group, so there may well be one waiting for you.
- Start your own pod — morsbags.org/create-a-pod. You don’t need a committee or a venue. A pod can be you and your sewing machine.
- Already made bags? Log them. Retrospectively. All of them. Yes, the ones from 2015 count.
- Just want to hear from us occasionally — sign up to the newsletter.
Every bag on that counter is potentially 500 plastic bags that never happened. We’d quite like to know the real total.
— The Morsbags team
Where the numbers come from: 635,421 bags logged across 2,957 pods; ~591,000 labels sold across all label products since December 2013; 4,855 distinct people who bought labels in a completed order, of whom 3,108 appear in no pod as owner or member (matched on account and email). The “ghost” total beyond that is honest speculation — that’s why we’re asking.