Loretta Lynn recalled wearing a ‘little flour-sack dress’ to watch the preacher’s Christmas sermon as a child Lynn’s parents couldn’t often afford new things, but her mother would ...

I wore those flour sack Easter dresses to Sunday School and church like I was the Queen of England," she elaborates. "I was so happy and so thankful and so proud. ...

With feed sacks and flour bags, farm women took thriftiness to new heights of creativity, transforming the humble bags into dresses, underwear, towels, curtains, quilts, and other household ...

Before "going green" was trendy, generations of Americans lived like conservationists. If something broke, it was fixed, not merely replaced. When a vegetable was in season, there were a dozen ...

Women made garments out of the leftover sacks, and companies noticed. By 1925, at least one company, Gingham Girl flour, packaged its goods in dress-quality fabric and used its sacks as a selling ...

Margaret Swicegood Fort reflects on 100 years of living, from making dresses out of flour sacks to survive the Depression to Asheville's current boom.

So they bought flour in 50- and 100-pound bags. Those sacks were made of durable cotton woven so sturdy the contents didn’t seep out. If that was good enough for flour, farm wives figured, it ...

Necessity is the mother of invention, we are told. The recent economy reminds us of how the mother of all hard times, the Great Depression of the 1930s, turned desperate ...

There were two things 1930s farm wives could always count on: Their good old reliable pedal-powered Singer sewing machine and a determination to make ends meet with whatever was at ...

The mills promoted the use of their feed and flour sacks by working with McCalls and Simplicity to create patterns that would incorporate these materials. "The history of the “sack” dresses is ...