Sewing With Nancy

We take it for granted that when we need fabric we go to our favorite fabric store or order online. That wasn't the case in the 1930s and '40s when feed sacks were a common source of fabric. My Nancy's Corner guest has made it her quest to collect and tell the fascinating stories of feed sack fabrics. I'd like you to welcome Chris Motl. Chris is a collector of these fabrics and has stories from the sacks. Welcome back to Sewing with Nancy, Chris. Thank you very much. You started collecting feed sacks to make quilts. I did, I was a quilter and about 20 years ago reproduction fabrics from the 1930s were popular. That led to the feed sacks which were popular at that time. That's how I started collecting. What a beautiful quilt you made. Thank you very much. I used some of the novelty and conversation prints that are very popular and I just used a simple design to show off the fabrics. So the source of fabrics that you used and that tell the stories from the sacks start with this flour sack. This is an interesting sack. It's from the Hillbilly Flour Mills in Texas. It's owner, W. Lee O'Daniel, ran for governor in 1938. He thought, well, if he didn't become governor he would sell a lot of flour. He was used to promoting his flour on the radio. He took his Hillbilly Boys Band on the road and campaigned. The "Flour, Not Pork" barrels were passed around by his children to collect donations. He did win the governorship and actually went on to become a senator from Texas. A precious print, a lot of interesting stories. It is, and we can date this one because of the 1938 campaign. It's history in flour sacks, interesting. Right, another interesting print is from the Percy Kent Bag Company. They've called it Kent's Cloth of the United Nations. It has some of the battles from World War II some of the early UN nations. We do know that it's after Pearl Harbor, but before D-Day because there's no depiction of D-Day on here. My favorite happens to be the "bad eggs" in the frying pan Hitler, Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito. You know, patriotism was very, very important in World War II. This particular sack has the Morse Code for victory. Oh, interesting! So it has the Vs, and then the dots and dash for victory. How fascinating. Isn't that fun? It is, it is. It's also in the patriotic colors of red, white and blue. Walt Disney was a great promoter, of course and he was putting his license on toys. Way back then? Way back then, for children. One of the bag companies got the exclusive license to do the Disney designs on their feed sacks. Let's turn this one around. It has Walt Disney's Cinderella Walt Disney Productions on it, and also, Alice In Wonderland. You know, we think of licensing as something that's kind of a new thing relatively but it isn't. No. It goes way back to feed sacks. The fabric is soft. The fabric is. They promoted it as being a finer percale than previous feed sack fabrics. They could be flour sacks or feed sacks. Probably flour sacks. The feed sack term kind of encompass flour sacks and sugar sacks. About how much yardage is in a feed sack? About a yard and a quarter. They're 36" wide, and generally 40" to 45" long. Okay, so a good amount of yardage. You have a little story there. I do have a little story. This is Biddy the Cat from the Bemis Bag Company. Her owner brought her to the bag factory to control the mice. She ended up becoming a symbol of that company. She is on a lot of their bags. I've got one here with Biddy up in the corner. This is a bag that they designed for quilters. So here's Biddy. It's kind of hard to see, but there's Biddy. Biddy sneaking out of the bag. The owner thought that was great. It meant that he had nothing to hide by letting the cat out of the bag. One of the Bemis executives saw his grandmother's flower garden quilt and thought that would be a great design. They put a label on, and a booklet inside the sack explaining how to make a quilt top. Chris, what wonderful examples. What great stories. Thank you for sharing them. Thank you. If you'd like to have more information on Chris and her feed sacks, you can go to nancyzieman.com and click under Nancy's Corner. Also at nancyzieman.com, please watch 52 of the most recent Sewing with Nancy programs sign up for my blog, or Facebook, or social media. Thanks to Denise Abel for being my guest during this two-part series on "Stress-Free Machine Quilting." Thank you for joining me. Bye for now.