Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Feedsack envy

After Etsy's recent feature on feedsack fabrics (here, if you missed it), i decided i needed to get around to sharing this 1953 brochure on sewing with feedsacks.  I got it in a wonderful lot of oddball sewing items - a few commercial patterns, a homemade brown paper mystery pattern or two, a heap of 4-H sewing booklets (which will get their own feature one of these days...), and this:

It's a little after the heyday of fabric feedsacks, but it's fun to see how many bags are needed for different dresses and useful to learn how to play around with pattern layouts to use your fabric as efficiently as possible... a skill that's especially handy for those who sew from vintage patterns, where the fabric widths on the layout chart may not correspond to what you can get easily today.

Wonder if i can convince the feed mills i buy from to switch back to cotton sacks... i'd sure love to have a little extra fabric packaging the stuff i have to buy anyway!

2 comments:

What-I-Found said...

You might like a few posts I did on this same topic;

http://what-i-found.blogspot.com/2010/02/sewing-with-cotton-bags-1952.html

Fripperie said...

Thanks for sharing! It's fun to see how the dress styles and artwork change from season to season...