January 18, 2008

Flour sacks, feed sacks, quilts, and collectors

My grandmother told me a while back that when she was a kid, all her dresses and clothes were sewn out of old flour sacks. I'd always thought of flour sacks as something like burlap, but she told me that no, they were good cotton and came in assorted prints and that her mother tried to buy bags of flour with pretty prints.

posted by dilettante 16 years ago
  • WONDERFUL! post, dilettante! All I've ever gotten with livestock feed was paper or woven plastic sacks, but when the feed companies stopped buying them back, they turned into a great resource useful for many things. I imaging if I had tons of feed or flour sacks around I'd be tempted to quilt or sew something also. I've always been fascinated by feed sack dresses and such. Used to have a plain, but cute, child's dress worn by my g-ma, and a quilt made out of colorful prints, both unfortunately lost. Much effort into a lovely post. Thank you. *puts bag over head*
  • Thanks, BlueHorse. This picture from the Library of Congress post made me remember and go look all this stuff up.
  • My mom grew up dirt poor on a dirt farm. Every year she got one dress, made by my grandmother from calico chicken feed sacks that she stored up in the attic. Mom would pick out the sacks and the pattern she liked, and her mom would go to work. If you met her today, you would never suspect such a childhood. The woman never leaves the house less than perfectly coiffed.
  • Although there was more than one a year, my Mom grew up in feed sack dresses, too, MCT. Grandma also made the patterns herself, out of newspaper.
  • Flour sacks are one of those things that make me stop and think how much life has changed in the last hundred years. It wasn't so long ago (c.f. MCT's mother) that people bought flour by the GIANT SACK. And lots of them, too, if they had enough sacks left over to start a collection and use it for quilting and sewing. I'm 36, and I'd be surprised if I've used the equivalent of ONE sack of flour in my entire life. No quilting history thread would be complete without a link to the quilts of Gees Bend. Many of which were made from "cotton sacking material," which I assume is flour/feed sacks.