Feed Sack Sewing: Clothing Made From Flour and Feed Bags

How did families turn flour and feed sacks into wearable clothing, and why did companies start printing them on purpose?

Flour, sugar, and livestock feed were sold in cloth sacks for practical reasons that had nothing to do with fashion. Bag manufacturers used cotton fabrics such as osnaburg, sheeting, and percale because they were durable and cheap, and rural households, already in the habit of wasting nothing, reused the empty sacks as dish towels, rags, and eventually rougher clothing once the printed brand names were scrubbed or soaked away. This was frugality, not style, and for decades it carried a real stigma: dressing a child in a feed sack was a visible sign of hardship.

Cloth bags themselves were a nineteenth-century development. Food staples had shipped in wooden barrels earlier in the 1800s, and it was the sewing machine, widely adopted by the 1840s, that made mass-produced cloth sacking practical for manufacturers in the first place. The Civil War disrupted the supply of Southern cotton to Northern mills, and bag makers turned to imported Indian burlap to fill the gap, which is part of why the coarsest, earliest feed sacks were rough enough to serve mainly as rags and farm towels rather than anything worn close to the skin.

World War I produced an odd detour into decoration rather than plain reuse. American mills shipped millions of pounds of flour to Belgium in forty-nine-pound sacks to relieve wartime famine, and Belgian recipients, grateful and resourceful, embroidered, painted, and beaded the emptied sacks before sending hundreds of these decorated "art flour sacks" back to the United States as thank-you gifts. It was a strange preview of what American households would later do out of necessity rather than gratitude: treat a feed sack as a surface worth decorating, not just cloth to be discarded.

The shift toward deliberate reuse began with a single company's marketing decision. In 1925, the George P. Plant Milling Company of St. Louis packaged its Gingham Girl flour in pink and blue checked cotton rather than plain white sacking. Women's Wear reported that the printing "can be washed out easily, leaving a large piece of gingham which may be used for an apron or dress," a line that treated the empty bag as a selling point rather than an afterthought. The Textile Bag Manufacturers Association followed with its own booklet of sewing patterns, first issued around 1928 as Sewing with Flour Bags and reissued from 1933 as Sewing with Cotton Bags; by 1937 its circulation had reached roughly 318,000 copies distributed through home economics classes, 4-H clubs, and WPA programs.

Pattern books solved half the problem. Plain dyed bags still looked like plain dyed bags. In 1936, the Percy Kent Bag Company of Kansas City, Missouri, began selling "Tint-Sax," bags in eleven pastel shades, and other mills followed with genuine printed patterns rather than solid color. Vice president Richard K. Peek pushed this hardest, enough that a 1946 Time magazine profile called him "the acknowledged Hattie Carnegie of sack fashions," naming him alongside one of the era's best-known couturiers. Grain and feed salesmen reportedly complained that farmers were now choosing which feed to buy based on their wives' opinion of the bag's print, not the feed inside it.

The stigma around wearing a sack was real enough to make headlines on both ends of the 1920s. In October 1921, Vogue covered a "Beggars' Ball," a costume party with a ten-dollar spending limit, and pictured a guest dressed head to toe in flour sacking, printed labels left visible, with a kitchen sieve worn as a hat: reused sacking as a knowing joke about poverty, wearable precisely because everyone in the room could afford not to actually need it. By 1928 the same material carried the opposite message. The Women's Society of the Millard Avenue Presbyterian Church in Chicago sewed a pair of pajamas from five flour sacks and presented them to President Calvin Coolidge, known for his personal frugality, as an endorsement of his economic program. The same fabric could read as a joke, a virtue, or a hardship, depending entirely on who was wearing it and why.

Even at its most fashionable, feed sack sewing kept one foot in disguise. Women soaked or bleached out company logos, dyed finished garments to hide their origin, and added ribbon, rickrack, or contrast stitching to make a sack dress read as store-bought. The goal was rarely to display the fabric's source; it was to get a presentable, wearable garment out of material that happened to be free.

World War II turned that necessity into something closer to a civic duty. In 1943, the War Production Board reserved most cotton cloth for military and industrial use, but commodity bags were classified as industrial packaging and stayed available while ordinary dress fabric grew scarce. Textile bag manufacturers ran the slogan "a yard of material saved is a yard gained for victory," and farm women organized "Sack and Snack" clubs to trade fabric and patterns. The demand did not fade when the war ended: a 1946 Senate hearing investigating a continued shortage of affordable cotton clothing found, according to dress historian Loris Connolly's research, that mills were still routing available cotton into feed sacks rather than dress goods.

Manufacturers turned the whole practice into a contest. The National Cotton Council and the Textile Bag Manufacturers Association ran an annual Cotton Bag Sewing Contest into the 1950s; a dress Dorothy Overall of Caldwell, Kansas, sewed for the 1959 contest, and which won second place in its regional division, is now held by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History as a representative example of the form.