August 15, 2025 • 22 mins
We think of recycling as a modern concept. However, our ancestors did it long before it was cool. Using cotton feed sacks was one of those.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Good morning.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
This is Emma, and oh there's nobody if in on
the highway, if the end of my driveway. What a
novel concept. This is Friday, and it is August the fifteenth.
Maybe halfway through August will turn around and be Labor Day.
That's kind of how my how my line of work goes.
We see Memorial Day and there's this little blip in
(00:25):
the middle call the fourth of July, and then we
turn around and it's Labor Day.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
So here we are.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
We're almost there at this point in time, at least
in Texas, we've got most everybody back in school. I
think other states may start later than this, but uh,
our folks are pretty much all back in school at
this point. So I thought today we would talk about
something a little bit fun. Maybe what's fun for me? Uh,
(00:55):
depending on what you what's interesting.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
To you, and that I guess has to do with
whether or not you listen to podcasts like this. Hopefully
it'll be fun. I forget a lot.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Of times that there are things, especially consider my age,
that I know and remember that other people don't know
about it. And the reason I say that is because
I am in a several prepping groups online on Facebook,
and I don't even know how we got into this subject,
(01:27):
but something about I don't know if it was recycling,
I don't know if it had anything to do.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
With clothes or whatever.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
And I said something about I made a comment about
how people used to take feedsacks and make clothes, and
I didn't even think about the fact that the people
in the group would think I was talking about what
we currently refer to as burlap, what we used to
(01:59):
call tosa, because we had a lot of feed in
that too, But I was actually talking about printed cotton sacks,
and a lot of feed came and printed cotton sacks
and printed I mean it was printed with a design
like a you know, like a piece of fabric. And
(02:20):
the reason it was is because in the I will
say this started probably in the eighteen fifties when things
goods began being transported by train and so they could
stack stuff up in the train cars. They started you know,
cotton was reasonably cheap, so because it was grown everywhere
(02:41):
nearly and it they could make sacks out of it,
and it wasn't heavy, so it didn't add to the
weight of the of the bag.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Of feed or flour or whatever.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
You were talking talking about, but it actually gave you
a good sturdy sack to put it in. And then
they threw those sacks and stacked them up into the.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Rail cars and that's how they were transported.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Well, one of the things, and when we go back
a couple of chapters in Mary Maverick's memoirs, when they, uh,
mister Maverick went off to back to the United States
to get some supplies for them, one of the things
Mary mentions is that they got fabric or material dressed,
(03:37):
you know, fabric to make clothes enough for two years,
because you know, she can run to Walmart, she can.
You know, Amazon did not deliver to her front barge
in x Antonio at that point, and nowadays we can't
even get fabric.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
That's a whole another subject.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
She So they had to order, and they had to
order for a long time. At one time they had,
you know, when he went supplies, he bought stuff to
last them for several years, because obviously it was a
big deal for him to have to travel from San
Antonio to back to the United States, even if he
went to just New Orleans. Okay, and I'm taking a
(04:17):
side here. Yesterday we were talking about the Mexican Army
going to and from San Antonio and the border with Mexico,
which is the Rio Grand River.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
I looked up.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
I looked that up on Google Maps, and the about
the straightest, straightest distance I could find was from San
Antonio to Renos, Mexico, and that is about two hundred
and fifty miles. Well, if you take it to consideration
at that point traveling by horse or wagon or whatever
you were in I don't know that you know, in
(04:51):
this case, maybe the armies were marching.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
On foot ten ten miles a day.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
That's going to take you twenty five days, so it's
a better part of a month to get from San
Antonio to the Rio brand or vice versa.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Anyway, go back to my subject.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
So in the eighteen fifties and then later on, people
and as people, you know a lot of times on
the frontier, people raised their own feed. But as you know,
commercial operations started and commercial feed could be purchased, and
even if you were getting you know, if you went
(05:30):
to as you saw in the old Westerns a long
time ago, you know that hook up the wagon, hitch
up the wagon to the horses and they go to
town for supplies, and so you know they might get
flour and sugar and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Well that would have been in cotton sacks as well.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
And so for women living out on farms, which at
that point in time was most everybody, this was literally
a free source of fabric. And one the companies that
made the sacks, you know, for the companies that sold
the supplies, figured out that people were using their bags
(06:12):
to sew with and make different things. You could make
pillow cases, you could make curtains, or you could make
a lot of times people made underwear. You could do
all kinds of things with these white sacks. Well, then
they decided to start making them with prints. And so
if you add several feed sacks with the same print,
(06:34):
then you had enough to make a dress if it
were you know, if you were doing it for little children,
you could probably get a like for example of maybe
a toddler or whatever, you could actually get a dress
out of one sack. So what happened is women would
get the sacks and they would if they had to
(06:56):
have several sacks of feet, they'd make sure whatever, they
would try to make sure they got all the same print. Well,
you know, if these were all stacked up in the
feats general store, the feed store or whatever. Then you
know they'd have to dig through them to find the
exact prints that matched anyway, So I forget that. People
(07:18):
didn't know that, and I actually grew up that way.
They were still making feed sacks in printed cotton in
the fifties and sixties, and I vaguely remember as a
small child. By the time I got up into elementary
school in the med To and middle school in the
(07:39):
mid to late sixties, then that wouldn't have By then
we had moved on to polyestra double knitting. But up
until then I do vaguely remember having a dress made
out of feed sacks. So, as I've always said, in
my family was about one generation off from the rest
of the world anyway, so.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
We did use feats.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
We can still find quilts made with feedsack material. I
have some feed sacks, some actual feedsacks that I've purchased
at like estate sales and that kind of stuff. My
mother would probably rolling over in her graves. She knew
how much I paid for him for something she used
to get for free. But they were very handy, and
(08:25):
the whole purpose of this conversation is to explain what
people did little bitty tiny things, kind of like what
Mary Maverick was talking about yesterday.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
They were in this little house where.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
They had escaped too as they were running from the
invading army, and they were I guess they were in
Gonzales at this point, and so they did some things
to kind of decorate this little house or cabin or
whatever they were doing they were living in. And that's
what women used to do. They took whatever they had
(09:03):
available and worked with it, and feed sacks are a
good example of that. So this shows you that how
people used something that was at hand, made something pretty
or attractive out of it, and then made hard times
less hard. And that is actually part of the mindset
(09:25):
of how you deal with hard times is concentrating on
things that you can do to make things, even if
it's making.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Things a little bit better.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Now, our dilemma is gonna be we're not gonna have
any fabric to do this with. The Obviously feed doesn't
come in those kind of sacks anymore and probably won't
that in our lifetime if ever.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
But it's there are other things that we can use
to recycle.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
For example, the bags that feed come see in now,
some some feed comes in these kind of bags. They're
almost like woven plastic. They're very sturdy, they're very tough.
And I've actually done this and I've seen them for
sale where somebody has taken those bags and they've you know,
(10:20):
taken them apart, took all the stitching out of them
or you know where they were glued or whatever, and
spread them out and then cut them into pieces and
made toats with them. And they make great toats because
they're very sturdy. It's this I don't think you tear
up this stuff that feed sacks are made out of them. Now,
(10:40):
now you're pretty limited as to what you can do
with it. Obviously you're not making any kind of clothing,
but you can make things like bags and toats and
that kind of thing that would be useful.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
So there's that. That's a good idea.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
It's a matter of what do we have at hand,
and how can we use that in creative ways to
make things better? As I said, like what Mary did.
She did some kind of little shelf. They had some
little brick of brac things with them that they put
on the shelf. She borrowed a mirror from somebody. I mean,
(11:13):
you know, there was just things that she did to
make what would have been a very austere dwelling be
more attractive and looked more like home, sort of make
a nest. I'm a firm believer in making a nest.
So I wanted to talk about the feedsacs today just
because they're very interesting. It's I love, you know, I
(11:37):
have old on the brain. We've established that a long
time ago. So I like to see old quilts. I
like to see what old quilts are made out of.
There is a it's pretty easy to tell what a
fabric in a quilt is feedsack fabric because it has
a much looser weave. It's a little bit coarser fabric
(11:58):
than the actual commercial fabric that was.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Made back then.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
And I think I feed sacks. Feed Sacks were generally
in their heyday in the thirties and forties. In fact,
one of the things I heard about the forties is
because they were declared an industrial textle because they were
feed came in them. They were not rationed. Fabric in
(12:25):
general was rationed, but feed sacks were not, and so
therefore women had access to feed sacks when they wouldn't
have access to anything else. But if you see feed
sack material in a quilt, you can generally tell it
by the fact that the weave is a lot looser.
Fabric used to be much better made than it is now.
(12:48):
We can't even get fabric like fabric was produced.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
In the past.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
It was a much more higher quality fabric than what
we get now. But having said that, one of the
things I read a while back was that about two
thirds of the clothing in this country comes through the
South China Sea. Well, the South China Sea is kind
(13:13):
of busy right now and doesn't show any signs of
slowing down. And if there was a comes a time
when the South China Sea is not available for shipping
from various sundry parts of the South Asian area of
the planet, that's going to be a problem. Now, at
this point in time, we have some clothing in this
(13:34):
country that you know, just dealing with fabric, and the
clothes we have would last us for a little while.
But there if we are unable at some point to
get clothing, then it's going to become a necessity.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
To recycle the clothing we have.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
That's going to be our only source and so that's
where it's going to be important to be able, say,
for you're talking about children. Children are going to grow,
so they're going to have to have, you know, bigger
clothes as they grow taller, so clothes will have to
be handed down, that kind of thing. And as it is,
(14:14):
people do a lot of thrifting. You have people doing
closet clean outs on Facebook, so there's lots of different
Facebook marketplace they sell clothes.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
So clothes are not a problem at this point, but
they could.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Be someday, and so it is a something to at
least consider. But the feedsacks are a very fascinating part
of our history because it shows how people in much
more austere times than we have now used something that
was just meant for transport. Basically, they use that to
(14:51):
do something useful in their home. And to me, that's
one of the things women have always done in the past,
or at least used to do, is take what they
had to work with and make it something useful and
usually made it something attractive. Just the white cotton sacks,
(15:11):
what they used to do is they would bleach them
until they were able to get the printing from the
branding from the company that sold the flower or feed
or whatever, they would bleach it and get that out
and then they might die at a different colors, so
then they had different colors to work with, or they
(15:33):
just leave it white. And then, as I said, you
could make curtains out of it, you can make pillow
cases out of it. There were lots of different women
made aprons out of them. They had lots of uses
that we don't think of today because we just think, oh, well,
you know, you go buy whatever. If I want an apron,
I go to Walmart and they've got some and I
(15:56):
buy one and go with it. If I need pillow cases,
can do.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
The same thing. Or I can go to.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
You know, get online and go to a betting company
and buy whatever I want, have it come in from Amazon.
You know, I have almost daily deliveries from Amazon at
this rate. So we you know, the things that we
do now, we take those things for granted that they're
(16:25):
always going to be that way, and that is not
necessarily the case. It may change on us at some
point in time. So I hope what this talk does
is it helps us think about looking around us and
thinking how things can be recycled.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Kind of a small example.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
When we go to Walmart to the grocery store or
whatever and we get all these plastic bags. I've seen
people use those for lots of different things. For example, well,
I mean just basically if there was if there was
anything that we needed to do that with the plastic bags,
that was just basic as you can use them to
(17:09):
carry stuff around. For example, until my tomato harvest got
so big that I couldn't I couldn't carry it in
bags to get when they first started and then towards
the end where they started to feed her out, I
would take a couple of Walmart bags with me up
(17:29):
to the garden and I would pick the tomatoes, and
so then that was a way to carry that. You know,
we use them sometimes in the little trash cans and
the little waste paper basket. You can use them for
a liner. I mean, there's lots of different uses for
those plastic bags. I have seen where people have taken
those and kind of cut up up into strips and
(17:52):
use them to like crochet.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
I think it's what they did with them.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
And make mats for or that they could give to
the homeless. It's something to sleep them because it gave
them something that kept them off the ground. Well, that's
a good use of them as well. One of the
things I did is there's several patterns I'll see if I.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Can find one, i'll put it in the description. I
found a pattern for a bag holder.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
It's a crochete and it's kind of loosely crocheted, and
it's long and skinny, and you just hang it somewhere
in the kitchen or where every utility room and as
you take your stuff out of your bags when you
come home from the store, then you can just stuff
those bags in that holder, and then they're available to
pick them out and use them for whatever. So lots
(18:44):
of people will recycle those bags in one way or another.
And so that's just a good example of taking something
that's free that you're gonna get anyway and use. Those
pill bottles is another thing to think about. I use
especially if they're big around, if they're big enough, if
the diameter of it is big enough, I'll use them.
(19:07):
And generally every once in a while you get one
like that, I use it to put used rotary cutter blades.
And so eventually when I fill up this pill bottle,
then I'll throw it away and all of my rotary
cutter blades will be contained, so they'll just not be
loose in the garbage, which is not a good thing.
(19:30):
Same thing with needles or pins or whatever. If something
gets bent and I can't use it anymore than I
will throw it in this little pill bottle or a
pill bottle, and then I'm able to throw those away.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
So that's a good example. Anything that you need to keep,
that's little. I remember, this was a big deal.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
This was something probably most everybody did. Something my father
did is like when things used to come in glass
jar at the grocery store. He would take those and
he would nail the top to the underside of a shelf,
and then he would keep things like nails and screws
(20:12):
and bolts and all kinds of little things like that.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
He would use it.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
He would keep all those in those jars, and then
he could just take the jar and screw it, screw
it into the lid, and it would be under the shelf,
but you'd be able to see what was in there. So, uh,
we used jars all the time. You could use glass
jars for everything. Well, we don't get very many glass
jars anymore.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Now. Things are in plastic, which you could do the
same thing. I keep thinking. One of the things that.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
The dog babies like is they like the little bitty,
tiny many milk bones, and so that's a good treat
for them. It's just a bite and they love it,
and that's a good thing. They will do anything for
a drink, and so we use those quite a bit,
and they come in a big jug, a big plastic jug,
(21:10):
and so every time I throw one of those away,
I think, you know, there ought to be something I
can use this for.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
I have one that I used to mix up my.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Fertilizer for the tomatoes, and I could probably use some
others for garden stuff. But it's just a matter of
looking around and seeing what is available to us that
we're gonna have anyway, What can we use instead of
throwing away. You know, this is supposed to be recycling
(21:41):
was supposed to be a thing for the environment. You
really don't hear people talking about that much anymore. We
just talk about global warming and trying to survive without electricity,
which is not a good option.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
But recycling is.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Okay. I have arrived at the office and I have
lots of stuff to do today.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
I will talk to you.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
I'm working from home on Monday again, but I will
probably go work out on Sunday and I will uh
do one then taught you soon.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
Have good weekend.
Good morning.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
This is Emma, and oh there's nobody if in on
the highway, if the end of my driveway. What a
novel concept. This is Friday, and it is August the fifteenth.
Maybe halfway through August will turn around and be Labor Day.
That's kind of how my how my line of work goes.
We see Memorial Day and there's this little blip in
(00:25):
the middle call the fourth of July, and then we
turn around and it's Labor Day.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
So here we are.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
We're almost there at this point in time, at least
in Texas, we've got most everybody back in school. I
think other states may start later than this, but uh,
our folks are pretty much all back in school at
this point. So I thought today we would talk about
something a little bit fun. Maybe what's fun for me? Uh,
(00:55):
depending on what you what's interesting.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
To you, and that I guess has to do with
whether or not you listen to podcasts like this. Hopefully
it'll be fun. I forget a lot.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Of times that there are things, especially consider my age,
that I know and remember that other people don't know
about it. And the reason I say that is because
I am in a several prepping groups online on Facebook,
and I don't even know how we got into this subject,
(01:27):
but something about I don't know if it was recycling,
I don't know if it had anything to do.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
With clothes or whatever.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
And I said something about I made a comment about
how people used to take feedsacks and make clothes, and
I didn't even think about the fact that the people
in the group would think I was talking about what
we currently refer to as burlap, what we used to
(01:59):
call tosa, because we had a lot of feed in
that too, But I was actually talking about printed cotton sacks,
and a lot of feed came and printed cotton sacks
and printed I mean it was printed with a design
like a you know, like a piece of fabric. And
(02:20):
the reason it was is because in the I will
say this started probably in the eighteen fifties when things
goods began being transported by train and so they could
stack stuff up in the train cars. They started you know,
cotton was reasonably cheap, so because it was grown everywhere
(02:41):
nearly and it they could make sacks out of it,
and it wasn't heavy, so it didn't add to the
weight of the of the bag.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Of feed or flour or whatever.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
You were talking talking about, but it actually gave you
a good sturdy sack to put it in. And then
they threw those sacks and stacked them up into the.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Rail cars and that's how they were transported.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Well, one of the things, and when we go back
a couple of chapters in Mary Maverick's memoirs, when they, uh,
mister Maverick went off to back to the United States
to get some supplies for them, one of the things
Mary mentions is that they got fabric or material dressed,
(03:37):
you know, fabric to make clothes enough for two years,
because you know, she can run to Walmart, she can.
You know, Amazon did not deliver to her front barge
in x Antonio at that point, and nowadays we can't
even get fabric.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
That's a whole another subject.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
She So they had to order, and they had to
order for a long time. At one time they had,
you know, when he went supplies, he bought stuff to
last them for several years, because obviously it was a
big deal for him to have to travel from San
Antonio to back to the United States, even if he
went to just New Orleans. Okay, and I'm taking a
(04:17):
side here. Yesterday we were talking about the Mexican Army
going to and from San Antonio and the border with Mexico,
which is the Rio Grand River.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
I looked up.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
I looked that up on Google Maps, and the about
the straightest, straightest distance I could find was from San
Antonio to Renos, Mexico, and that is about two hundred
and fifty miles. Well, if you take it to consideration
at that point traveling by horse or wagon or whatever
you were in I don't know that you know, in
(04:51):
this case, maybe the armies were marching.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
On foot ten ten miles a day.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
That's going to take you twenty five days, so it's
a better part of a month to get from San
Antonio to the Rio brand or vice versa.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Anyway, go back to my subject.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
So in the eighteen fifties and then later on, people
and as people, you know a lot of times on
the frontier, people raised their own feed. But as you know,
commercial operations started and commercial feed could be purchased, and
even if you were getting you know, if you went
(05:30):
to as you saw in the old Westerns a long
time ago, you know that hook up the wagon, hitch
up the wagon to the horses and they go to
town for supplies, and so you know they might get
flour and sugar and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Well that would have been in cotton sacks as well.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
And so for women living out on farms, which at
that point in time was most everybody, this was literally
a free source of fabric. And one the companies that
made the sacks, you know, for the companies that sold
the supplies, figured out that people were using their bags
(06:12):
to sew with and make different things. You could make
pillow cases, you could make curtains, or you could make
a lot of times people made underwear. You could do
all kinds of things with these white sacks. Well, then
they decided to start making them with prints. And so
if you add several feed sacks with the same print,
(06:34):
then you had enough to make a dress if it
were you know, if you were doing it for little children,
you could probably get a like for example of maybe
a toddler or whatever, you could actually get a dress
out of one sack. So what happened is women would
get the sacks and they would if they had to
(06:56):
have several sacks of feet, they'd make sure whatever, they
would try to make sure they got all the same print. Well,
you know, if these were all stacked up in the
feats general store, the feed store or whatever. Then you
know they'd have to dig through them to find the
exact prints that matched anyway, So I forget that. People
(07:18):
didn't know that, and I actually grew up that way.
They were still making feed sacks in printed cotton in
the fifties and sixties, and I vaguely remember as a
small child. By the time I got up into elementary
school in the med To and middle school in the
(07:39):
mid to late sixties, then that wouldn't have By then
we had moved on to polyestra double knitting. But up
until then I do vaguely remember having a dress made
out of feed sacks. So, as I've always said, in
my family was about one generation off from the rest
of the world anyway, so.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
We did use feats.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
We can still find quilts made with feedsack material. I
have some feed sacks, some actual feedsacks that I've purchased
at like estate sales and that kind of stuff. My
mother would probably rolling over in her graves. She knew
how much I paid for him for something she used
to get for free. But they were very handy, and
(08:25):
the whole purpose of this conversation is to explain what
people did little bitty tiny things, kind of like what
Mary Maverick was talking about yesterday.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
They were in this little house where.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
They had escaped too as they were running from the
invading army, and they were I guess they were in
Gonzales at this point, and so they did some things
to kind of decorate this little house or cabin or
whatever they were doing they were living in. And that's
what women used to do. They took whatever they had
(09:03):
available and worked with it, and feed sacks are a
good example of that. So this shows you that how
people used something that was at hand, made something pretty
or attractive out of it, and then made hard times
less hard. And that is actually part of the mindset
(09:25):
of how you deal with hard times is concentrating on
things that you can do to make things, even if
it's making.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Things a little bit better.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Now, our dilemma is gonna be we're not gonna have
any fabric to do this with. The Obviously feed doesn't
come in those kind of sacks anymore and probably won't
that in our lifetime if ever.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
But it's there are other things that we can use
to recycle.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
For example, the bags that feed come see in now,
some some feed comes in these kind of bags. They're
almost like woven plastic. They're very sturdy, they're very tough.
And I've actually done this and I've seen them for
sale where somebody has taken those bags and they've you know,
(10:20):
taken them apart, took all the stitching out of them
or you know where they were glued or whatever, and
spread them out and then cut them into pieces and
made toats with them. And they make great toats because
they're very sturdy. It's this I don't think you tear
up this stuff that feed sacks are made out of them. Now,
(10:40):
now you're pretty limited as to what you can do
with it. Obviously you're not making any kind of clothing,
but you can make things like bags and toats and
that kind of thing that would be useful.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
So there's that. That's a good idea.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
It's a matter of what do we have at hand,
and how can we use that in creative ways to
make things better? As I said, like what Mary did.
She did some kind of little shelf. They had some
little brick of brac things with them that they put
on the shelf. She borrowed a mirror from somebody. I mean,
(11:13):
you know, there was just things that she did to
make what would have been a very austere dwelling be
more attractive and looked more like home, sort of make
a nest. I'm a firm believer in making a nest.
So I wanted to talk about the feedsacs today just
because they're very interesting. It's I love, you know, I
(11:37):
have old on the brain. We've established that a long
time ago. So I like to see old quilts. I
like to see what old quilts are made out of.
There is a it's pretty easy to tell what a
fabric in a quilt is feedsack fabric because it has
a much looser weave. It's a little bit coarser fabric
(11:58):
than the actual commercial fabric that was.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Made back then.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
And I think I feed sacks. Feed Sacks were generally
in their heyday in the thirties and forties. In fact,
one of the things I heard about the forties is
because they were declared an industrial textle because they were
feed came in them. They were not rationed. Fabric in
(12:25):
general was rationed, but feed sacks were not, and so
therefore women had access to feed sacks when they wouldn't
have access to anything else. But if you see feed
sack material in a quilt, you can generally tell it
by the fact that the weave is a lot looser.
Fabric used to be much better made than it is now.
(12:48):
We can't even get fabric like fabric was produced.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
In the past.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
It was a much more higher quality fabric than what
we get now. But having said that, one of the
things I read a while back was that about two
thirds of the clothing in this country comes through the
South China Sea. Well, the South China Sea is kind
(13:13):
of busy right now and doesn't show any signs of
slowing down. And if there was a comes a time
when the South China Sea is not available for shipping
from various sundry parts of the South Asian area of
the planet, that's going to be a problem. Now, at
this point in time, we have some clothing in this
(13:34):
country that you know, just dealing with fabric, and the
clothes we have would last us for a little while.
But there if we are unable at some point to
get clothing, then it's going to become a necessity.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
To recycle the clothing we have.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
That's going to be our only source and so that's
where it's going to be important to be able, say,
for you're talking about children. Children are going to grow,
so they're going to have to have, you know, bigger
clothes as they grow taller, so clothes will have to
be handed down, that kind of thing. And as it is,
(14:14):
people do a lot of thrifting. You have people doing
closet clean outs on Facebook, so there's lots of different
Facebook marketplace they sell clothes.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
So clothes are not a problem at this point, but
they could.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Be someday, and so it is a something to at
least consider. But the feedsacks are a very fascinating part
of our history because it shows how people in much
more austere times than we have now used something that
was just meant for transport. Basically, they use that to
(14:51):
do something useful in their home. And to me, that's
one of the things women have always done in the past,
or at least used to do, is take what they
had to work with and make it something useful and
usually made it something attractive. Just the white cotton sacks,
(15:11):
what they used to do is they would bleach them
until they were able to get the printing from the
branding from the company that sold the flower or feed
or whatever, they would bleach it and get that out
and then they might die at a different colors, so
then they had different colors to work with, or they
(15:33):
just leave it white. And then, as I said, you
could make curtains out of it, you can make pillow
cases out of it. There were lots of different women
made aprons out of them. They had lots of uses
that we don't think of today because we just think, oh, well,
you know, you go buy whatever. If I want an apron,
I go to Walmart and they've got some and I
(15:56):
buy one and go with it. If I need pillow cases,
can do.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
The same thing. Or I can go to.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
You know, get online and go to a betting company
and buy whatever I want, have it come in from Amazon.
You know, I have almost daily deliveries from Amazon at
this rate. So we you know, the things that we
do now, we take those things for granted that they're
(16:25):
always going to be that way, and that is not
necessarily the case. It may change on us at some
point in time. So I hope what this talk does
is it helps us think about looking around us and
thinking how things can be recycled.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Kind of a small example.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
When we go to Walmart to the grocery store or
whatever and we get all these plastic bags. I've seen
people use those for lots of different things. For example, well,
I mean just basically if there was if there was
anything that we needed to do that with the plastic bags,
that was just basic as you can use them to
(17:09):
carry stuff around. For example, until my tomato harvest got
so big that I couldn't I couldn't carry it in
bags to get when they first started and then towards
the end where they started to feed her out, I
would take a couple of Walmart bags with me up
(17:29):
to the garden and I would pick the tomatoes, and
so then that was a way to carry that. You know,
we use them sometimes in the little trash cans and
the little waste paper basket. You can use them for
a liner. I mean, there's lots of different uses for
those plastic bags. I have seen where people have taken
those and kind of cut up up into strips and
(17:52):
use them to like crochet.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
I think it's what they did with them.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
And make mats for or that they could give to
the homeless. It's something to sleep them because it gave
them something that kept them off the ground. Well, that's
a good use of them as well. One of the
things I did is there's several patterns I'll see if I.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
Can find one, i'll put it in the description. I
found a pattern for a bag holder.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
It's a crochete and it's kind of loosely crocheted, and
it's long and skinny, and you just hang it somewhere
in the kitchen or where every utility room and as
you take your stuff out of your bags when you
come home from the store, then you can just stuff
those bags in that holder, and then they're available to
pick them out and use them for whatever. So lots
(18:44):
of people will recycle those bags in one way or another.
And so that's just a good example of taking something
that's free that you're gonna get anyway and use. Those
pill bottles is another thing to think about. I use
especially if they're big around, if they're big enough, if
the diameter of it is big enough, I'll use them.
(19:07):
And generally every once in a while you get one
like that, I use it to put used rotary cutter blades.
And so eventually when I fill up this pill bottle,
then I'll throw it away and all of my rotary
cutter blades will be contained, so they'll just not be
loose in the garbage, which is not a good thing.
(19:30):
Same thing with needles or pins or whatever. If something
gets bent and I can't use it anymore than I
will throw it in this little pill bottle or a
pill bottle, and then I'm able to throw those away.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
So that's a good example. Anything that you need to keep,
that's little. I remember, this was a big deal.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
This was something probably most everybody did. Something my father
did is like when things used to come in glass
jar at the grocery store. He would take those and
he would nail the top to the underside of a shelf,
and then he would keep things like nails and screws
(20:12):
and bolts and all kinds of little things like that.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
He would use it.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
He would keep all those in those jars, and then
he could just take the jar and screw it, screw
it into the lid, and it would be under the shelf,
but you'd be able to see what was in there. So, uh,
we used jars all the time. You could use glass
jars for everything. Well, we don't get very many glass
jars anymore.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Now. Things are in plastic, which you could do the
same thing. I keep thinking. One of the things that.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
The dog babies like is they like the little bitty,
tiny many milk bones, and so that's a good treat
for them. It's just a bite and they love it,
and that's a good thing. They will do anything for
a drink, and so we use those quite a bit,
and they come in a big jug, a big plastic jug,
(21:10):
and so every time I throw one of those away,
I think, you know, there ought to be something I
can use this for.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
I have one that I used to mix up my.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Fertilizer for the tomatoes, and I could probably use some
others for garden stuff. But it's just a matter of
looking around and seeing what is available to us that
we're gonna have anyway, What can we use instead of
throwing away. You know, this is supposed to be recycling
(21:41):
was supposed to be a thing for the environment. You
really don't hear people talking about that much anymore. We
just talk about global warming and trying to survive without electricity,
which is not a good option.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
But recycling is.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
Okay. I have arrived at the office and I have
lots of stuff to do today.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
I will talk to you.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
I'm working from home on Monday again, but I will
probably go work out on Sunday and I will uh
do one then taught you soon.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
Have good weekend.
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