From The Popular Mechanics Do It Yourself Encyclopedia, Vol 4. I'm having great fun paging through the online volumes.
It's missing a couple of volumes but this one is on the Internet Archive.
Little Grey Bungalow
From The Popular Mechanics Do It Yourself Encyclopedia, Vol 4. I'm having great fun paging through the online volumes.
It's missing a couple of volumes but this one is on the Internet Archive.
5 comments:
I actually own a set of those books! And this brings up so many memories of my grandmother making me a couple of dresses out out of chicken feed sacks, too. In about 1958 or a little later. I even still have some of the material she used and found some more at a vintage fabric site on Etsy, might even have enough to make a blouse now. I actually saw flour still being sold in lovely fabric sacks when we lived in Tehachapi, CA back the early 1980's. Don't remember if I actually bought any as it came in 50 pound bags!
I can remember going with my grandfather to purchase chicken feed when I was a kid. He used to tease me later about taking so long to decide what I wanted. A lot of umm-ing and maybe-ing until I made up my mind. I was going to wear whatever I selected for a long time, so I wanted to be sure I got the right stuff.
Not too long ago, I bought some fabric to make doll dresses that simply "spoke" to me. When I did the dishes that night I realized it is a mini version of the fabric used to make me a dress back in the day. I still have a tea towel from the remnants of that dress.
I have a feedsack tablecloth and some remnants that I found at a church thrift store that look as though they might be from feedsacks.
Somewhere in my mess of a sewing room, I think I also have a booklet on how to make things from feedsacks.
I don't know what they used for feedsacks - probably 100% cotton, come to think of it - but they last forever! When I was pregnant with my fist child, my grandmother gave me two matching feedsacks to make a maternity top.
They were - are? - one square yard, so they'd have meant some fiddling to make anything larger that a dress for a four year old child. I was born in 1942, just as WWII was getting underway, so those bags were a blessing to keep me from going nekkid.
I find that a lot of older patterns (pre-1960) offer cutting layouts for 36 inch wide fabric. You'd certainly have to use up a lot of flour to get the # of sacks needed for a dress for the average adult woman, though.
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