Flour and Feed Sack Dresses

My new dresses were always so pretty. My mother made my dresses out of feed sacks and flour sacks.
Mother baked rolls, bread, cakes, and cookies for the grocery store in town so she bought flour by the hundred pound sacks. She also raised four hundred chickens in the spring so she bought a lot of chicken feed. In those days the feed came in pretty prints, stripes, flowers, etc. Most ladies in those days trimmed, washed, and set the color in the material and used it for making clothing.
It sometimes was frustrating for my mother to have to wait to get more flour when she could afford it in order to get more sacks. It was always a gamble to see if she could get flour in a sack that matched what she already had.
We had a room in the upstairs of our house called the “spare room”. In this room were boxes and boxes of material. Mother used this left over material to make quilts. My dad used to say, “ I just don’t understand why you cut it up just to sew it back together again.” Then he would grin at her.
The dresses that she made me were pretty, however they sometimes didn’t hold their shape very well. My mother would make me stand on a dining room chair to hem my skirts. It seemed like it took for ever. My legs would get itchy and it sometimes made me feel like I was going to fall over. Mother would remind me that my skirt had to hang right, so therefore, I had to stand still while she pinned the hem. I didn’t see why all the fuss.
When I was eleven years old my mother bought me a dress from Penny’s for my birthday. It was so soft. I noticed it immediately. That was the big difference between feed sack material and a “store-bought” dress.
When I was in about fifth grade, I was still wearing flour sack dresses because I can remember a beautiful suit that Mom made me that was two pieces. The dress piece said Gold Medal on the bodice and the skirt was the pretty print. Mom made a jacket that matched the skirt. It buttoned down the front. That is the outfit I wore to town on May first for a May Day festival. We all grabbed a ribbon and wove in and out of each other’s ribbons around the May Pole. Just for fun I looked for seed and flour sack material on the computer. It goes for high prices on E-Bay. My mother would just laugh and besides that, seldom can you buy anything but quilt blocks. The picture above is only big enough for about two quilt blocks.