Guest Author - Norma Shephard
During the early twentieth century in rural North America, homeowners found the labeling on cotton feedsacks to be a detraction from the surrounding calico, check, striped or flowered prints which could be used to make garments, pillow cases, dresser scarves, and even diapers. But the crisp, colorful lettering that identifies these bags as having contained kitchen staples like flour, sugar, and oatmeal along with company advertisements, excite present day collectors who value their visual appeal, variety, and reference to the past.
Some crafters appreciate these humble vintage textiles for their bold and fun graphics, turning them into table runners, cottage décor, and even funky handbags. Others value their novelty and fashion them into pillowcases, napkins, and burp cloths for use as wedding and baby shower gifts. There are those who prefer to leave them intact, preserving these icons of our agricultural, textile, and domestic history for future generations to enjoy.
For purists, the appeal is not only visual. Textile hound, Donna Young, rummages through attics and basements for these forgotten treasures claiming she can almost date an item by scent. She enjoys laundering her ancient finds. “Flour bags, which soften with each successive washing made excellent bloomers,” says Young, “although some children did not appreciate attending school with ‘Five Roses’ printed on their behinds.”
“Every feed bag tells a story,” says author and feedsack quilter, Nina Stahlschmidt, who has collected over 600 examples from around the globe. Especially poignant are the stories told of floursacks, embroidered by the Belgian people, and returned to North Americans in appreciation for civilian relief efforts during World War I.
Seen as a bonus left over from a purchase, cotton commodity bags were prized by homemakers who recycled them into household linens. Multiples of white sacks were opened, laid flat, and sewn together to produce bed sheets and quilt backs. As recently as 1960, national contests were held offering glamorous prizes for the best clothing items sewn from lower-thread-count print cottons. Country fairs offered first, second, and third place ribbons, along with 75cent incentives in similar competitions. At a time when nothing was wasted, remnants from these projects were transformed into doll clothes, or pieced together to produce quilt blocks and tops in log cabin, star, or patchwork variations. Double thread “lock-stitch” seams unraveled easily and the thread was saved for later use as pudding bag strings and umbilical ties.
While a comprehensive assortment of cotton commodity bags provides a visual history of the advertising techniques and textile patterns developed over the past century and a half in North America, it is not necessary to build a vast collection of feedsacks in order to enjoy them; a single authentic example will evoke memories of the days of homemade kitchen roller towels, Five Roses undergarments, and grandmother’s sewing basket. Who says recycling is a modern concept?
