Flour Sack Dress

There’s a little green and pink faded dress hanging on my sewing room wall. My doll, Mary Jane, wore it proudly. There were rips in the fabric, crudely repaired with black thread by 8-year-old me. Before the dress was Mary Jane’s, it was mine. It was sewn by hand with my mom’s tiny signature stitches and made from a printed flour sack.

Before the 1800s, commodities, such as feed, seeds, flour, and sugar were shipped in barrels. The invention of the sewing machine and advances in textile manufacturing made it cheaper to ship these products in cloth sacks, which were later used as rags and towels. By the 1900s, some goods were packaged in lighter, softer cotton sacks and poorer women sewed those into undergarments, bedsheets, and curtains.

This sort of recycling might reveal a family’s financial status, so most tried to hide the fact that they were using cotton sacks. Company logos were painstakingly soaked off and trims and embellishments were added.

During the depression, cloth sacks became widely used to make clothing. The companies manufacturing these products took notice, and made sacks easier to recycle, thus selling more of their product. The chain stitching across the bottom of the bag was easily removed. Companies produced garment quality cloth in several prints, and used removable ink for their logo with instructions on how to dissolve it.

A 5-pound bag of sugar provided 1 foot of cloth; a 100-pound bag provided 1 yard. It took around 4 yards for a woman’s dress. Families sometimes saved sacks and traded with neighbors to get enough in a particular print. Traveling peddlers bought and sold flour sacks.

During World War II cotton was rationed to make uniforms for soldiers and flour was packaged in paper bags. Feed sacks were still available and it was patriotic and thrifty to repurpose them into garments.

My sisters wore flour sack dresses and underwear, too. My sister Juanita described them as “being very uncomfortable, no elastic in the legs. They had a tendency to ride up your rear end.” A flour company manager joked, “They used to say that when the wind blew across the south you could see our trade name on all the girls’ underpants.“