The Rickrack Rag

I noticed in a news broadcast from Washington, DC the other day (lots of broadcasts from DC lately, no?) that the cherry blossoms are opening. While we’ve already featured cherries in our Feedsack Friday posts, with the advent of early spring I thought today I’d feature another early bloomer, the dogwood. Is your dogwood blooming yet? The buds on ours are fattening, it’ll still be a little while until they burst, along with the daffodils.

These three are different colored versions of the same pattern; but it seems to be the most common one, and I’ve never run out of them. Other dogwood sacks are hard to find and in fact this is all I can find this week. When we get to roses, it’ll be different.

We’re back and forth this week, from the forties to the sixties, nighttime temperatures in the 30’s mostly. Soon spring will settle in, as I frantically work to get the garden ready.

Spring is finally here. It’s chilly today, with snow flurries early this morning, not atypical of the first day of spring, but we’re seeing more hours of daylight, and the temperatures in general are rising.

Though spring is our most eagerly awaited and anticipated season, it’s also the one that brings the most responsibility. It’s time to ready the garden for planting and clean up winter debris, and also time to prepare for our spring season of outdoor antique sales as the weekends warm. And it’s a time for beginning new projects, as if we didn’t already have plenty on our plates. Luckily the season brings with it a burst of energy; hopefully the energy lasts long enough to accomplish a reasonable number of the tasks.

Between chilly gusts of wind today I managed to photograph a quilt that I thought was appropriate to early spring both in color and theme. I don’t know if the pattern has a name, or whether it’s supposed to represent anything in particular, but the idea of flowers along with the preponderance of green along with a little Easter purple seemed to me just the thing for today.

With all this greenery, the real flowers won’t be far behind - our snowdrops are blooming throughout the woods, the daffodils are 4 inches out of the ground, and Tim’s already planted carrots and peas in the field.

Some folks call feedsack fabric Chicken linen. Since the main source for many people was the bags that contained their chicken feed, the term is appropriate. A couple of our favorite chicken feed sacks are shown here:

But of course, the sacks above were not reused until the printing was washed out. On the other hand, there are many printed feedsacks that also have more than one reason to be called chicken linen:

Some show chickens or roosters among various kitchen items:

And others show chickens in the farm setting, including last but hardly least, the weathercock, tirelessly pointing the wind direction from atop the farmhouse or barn.

Here it is St. Patrick’s day, and I have nothing in particular ready for the blog, so I’ll have to improvise.

So, in the case of the feedsack shown at left, we have green and shamrocks, and the H is for Hibernia???

OK, well, it’s really a feedsack with 4 leaf clovers to commemorate 4-H clubs, but it’s the best I could do on short notice.

Happy St. Patrick’s day, and may the luck o’ the Irish be with ye!!

One of the things that made the feedsack phenomenon what it was, was the incredible amount of promotion that went into the idea of recycling the bags into other products. But few companies that produced the bags had many ways of publicizing their products. Today we find their advertising in relatively few places - on logo feedsacks (the plain ones with advertising labels) or on paper labels that remain on the printed sacks.

One of the popular bag makers was the Werthan Company of Nashville, TN. We’ve had a number of their sacks, and the ones with paper labels do have their advertixing. Here’s a detail from a Werthan “Banded Bag”:

And another with a different label has only the simple printed legend, Werthan Bags Nashville:

You may also remember the Werthan Co. from the film Driving Miss Daisy. But you may not have seen some of their other, more clever promotional items.

Here’s a needle book advertising the merits of Werthan Bags:

The other items we’re presenting today are actually made from Werthan feedsack fabric. First, a miniature feedsack with the Werthan label:

Finally, something to appeal to the younger set. I’m not sure if these were actually available printed on sacks, or if this was a specialty advertising item only. Here’s Pokey the Pony:

Werthan is still in business, now making paper bags for the pet food industry; their old cotton/bag mill has been converted to residential lofts.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a quilt that was a 1930’s variation on a traditional pattern. So again today, a quilt we just found last week here in Berks County, PA. This time it’s a lone star, or Star of Bethlehem, in anything but traditional color and form.

This came from an estate where quilting was a family affair; there were two sons who had each made their own redwork quilt at the age of 16. Do you know any 16 year old boys making any quilts today??
Anyway, I love the color choices, and the way the star is framed. The quilt does boast an altogether 1930’s character in it’s geometric layout. Oh, and the back is a great color contrast…

More pictures of this quilt can be seen here.

With a warm spell expected this weekend (finally!), perhaps we’ll see the first robin of the season. I know I actually heard the call of a mourning dove the other day. Which brings us to this week’s feedsack Friday topic, those harbingers of spring, the birds. Not larger fowl, but small and mid-size birds appear on a number of feedsacks.
Bluebirds and other songbirds appear in birdhouses, on a see-saw and in a multi-colored flock:

Some we can identify, but others are difficult.

And there are pet birds - cage birds and tropical ones.

Not too many this week, though some of these did, as before, come in several different colorways. I hope we start to see them outdoors this weekend.