CHAPTER 21

Feed Sack Dresses

With eight kids to clothe, Mom embraced the motto “repair, reuse, make do, and don’t throw anything away.” Grandma and Mom knew how to use everything and not be wasteful. Mom sewed patches over holes in clothes. Grandma lengthened hems. Younger siblings “made do” with hand-me-downs. My older brother remembers most of his clothes coming from an older cousin in Grand Forks. When clothes could no longer be mended, the buttons were cut off to be reused and the fabrics were saved for making rugs or used as rags for cleaning.

When Dad brought home big sacks of flour, livestock feed, or chicken feed, Grandma used the printed cotton muslin sacks as material to sew dresses and shirts for Mom and us kids, as well as blouses, pillowcases, aprons, and kitchen towels. The sacks came in floral, checked, or plaid prints.

We had three categories of clothes: farm clothes, school clothes, and dress clothes. Our clothes came from one of three places: Grandma sewed them, we ordered them from a mail order catalogue, or we wore hand-me-downs.

While working and playing on the farm, we dressed like ragamuffins in farm clothes. We were not concerned about wearing a striped top with plaid bottoms. For hauling hay, we wore long sleeves and long pants because the stubble was itchy. For winter barn chores, we donned long underwear, wool socks, scarves, a barn coat, and four-buckle black boots over our shoes. In the heat of summer, we wore pedal pushers or shorts and sleeveless blouses.

Changing into farm clothes was the first thing we did when we got home from school. The second thing we did was make jelly sandwiches for our afternoon snack. Then we began our chores. For morning barn chores, not wanting our hair to smell like the barn, we wore dishtowels tied turban-style at the forehead.

For school, we dressed the same as the other kids in our community. Our fashion guidelines came from the models in the Sears Roebuck catalogue. We girls wore cotton slacks to school. If we wore a dress we had to wear slacks under the dress when we went outside. I do not remember why, but we always wore undershirts.

We never needed more than one dressy outfit at a time. We received a new outfit for Easter and one for Christmas, and we wore those for church and social events for the remainder of the year. Black patent leather Mary Jane shoes with a strap, along with a hat and gloves, completed our outfits for church. We wore circle skirts with stiff petticoats called can-cans, which we stiffened with sugar and water.

Grandma’s Dressmaking

Grandma delighted in sewing dresses, jumpers, and blouses for her granddaughters. She started with the floral or checked feed sack material and then added ruffles, lace, and rickrack. As her assistant, I straightened out the small drawers of bobbins, thread, thimbles, basting tape, pins, and fabric to help keep everything organized.

With her mouth full of straight pins, Grandma measured patterns against my torso. Spreading the fabric on the kitchen table, she pinned a McCall’s, Butterick, or Simplicity pattern to the fabric before cutting it with her pinking shears. Her Singer sewing machine was powered by a large foot pedal—the faster she pumped, the faster she sewed. Soon she requested that I stand on a chair while she checked for straight seams, even darts, and proper hem length. Grandma made our dresses with a good-size hem on them so they could be lengthened as we grew taller. I cherished the dresses Grandma made more than any catalogue-ordered dress. With extra material, she made a dress for a younger sister or a doll.

Mail Order Catalogs

Each fall before school, we selected underpants, undershirts, knee-highs, anklets, and black-and-white saddle shoes from the Sears Roebuck, JC Penney, or Montgomery Ward mail order catalogues. In the catalogue, there was even a page where we could measure our feet to determine what size to order.

Gingham Aprons and Housedresses

Grandma and Mom wore cotton housedresses with gingham aprons over them to keep the dresses clean. Grandma made beautiful aprons with chicken scratch embroidery. After the 1960s, my mother started to wear pantsuits, but Grandma never donned a pair of slacks during her life.

Women wore dress gloves and hats for church and carried a purse with a hanky in it. Mom and Grandma finished off their outfits with clip-on earrings and Evening in Paris cologne.

Toni Home Perm

Most of the time we girls wore a bob, but occasionally Mom would give us a Toni home permanent. She was able to stretch the waving lotion and reuse the tissue squares so all three of us girls could get a perm from one kit. Enduring the smell of the milky solution was a whole lot easier than enduring the pain of Mom wrapping each strand of hair around a pink plastic curler. Truth be told, we never got curls—we got frizz. We set our hair with wave set and bobby pins.

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

–Matthew 6:25–27 (NIV)