The Rickrack Rag

We haven’t had any feedsack dresses for a while, but we do still have one feedsack garment (other than aprons) on hand: this pair of vintage culottes!

I can’t imagine wearing them in the garden, so we’re offering them on eBay. There’s certainly plenty of fabric there for anyone who wants to repurpose.

A brief post today for Feedsack Friday, to introduce our mascot.  Just another of the many uses to which feedsacks were put, of course we can’t forget the little ones.


See you next Feedsack Friday!

Again, it’s the middle of our busy season, so I haven’t had much time to consider themes for this series, but there are a few feedsacks I’ve just gotten (most of which I hadn’t seen before), and so I thought I’d present a few here.

Several of these are currently available in my eBay store, along with some others – auctions ending Tuesday, May 28.

As we’ve seen before, I never seem to have enough time to do everything to keep both this business and my home going, and of course, spring is the busiest season. So today I thought I’d show one of the feedsacks we bought at our spring show, this one is timely.

A border print feedsack that gives you the choice of several times of day, from five of six to three o’clock… and the hands are very nearly the same size, so the readings may be somewhat ambiguous.  I can’t remember seeing another feedsack featuring clock faces, but I’m sure there must be some.  Anyone? 

This one would make really cute kitchen curtains, and along with the other nineteen we bought at the show, it’s mint, still in sack form.

We had a late spring here in PA Dutch country. But for the last couple of weeks, the sun has been shining and things are warming up nicely, and the grass needs cutting, too. The tulips have already bloomed, but I thought we should show tulips on feedsacks this week.  I’m not absolutely sure that all the flowers we’ve selected are tulips, but many of them are, and the others at least are close. 





As you can see, our selections have run the gamut of realistic and stylized tulips, multiple colorways, a border print sack, and still I’m sure that there are more we didn’t find on the first or second time through. That’s it for this week, see you next Feedsack Friday!
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I think I’ve written before that some of our best finds are things that we turn up right here at home, among the many items we’ve stashed away while accumulating our stock or collection of vintage textiles – items that we bought at auctions, flea markets or privately and put away, not necessarily having an idea of what to do with them. Since we’d been doing that sort of thing for nearly twenty years, naturally we’ve forgotten many of the things in those boxes and containers. So today, when we access an area that we haven’t explored in a while, it’s like an archaeological dig; a history of our follies of the past, some of which turn out not to have been follies at all, but instead rather fortunate purchases.

One of the best examples of this is a group of embroidered pieces we unearthed last year. When we bought them, Chinese embroidery was popular among some collectors, but the value changed considerably with the growth of China’s economy and the resulting availability of cash to collectors in China. Not having a ready market at the time, we put them away. Last year we finally offered them for sale.

There were a variety of motifs, some floral, others figural; most of the items were longer, narrow pieces, known as sleeve bands, apparently from Chinese robes.

Knowing that we didn’t have a large investment involved, I started most of them at about $25 each, and though some went for opening bid, there were others that brought one or two hundred.

But one was different, round instead of rectangular, completely covered in stitching, just magnificent.   This one had to be a cut above the others, so we started it above $100.   And there was some chinese calligraphy on the back, which we also photographed.   Soon our suspicions were confirmed, as we got a message asking if we would sell it outright for $1250, and more requests for instant purchase, to which we politely replied that it was our policy to allow the auction to run its course.

The bidding began immediately, but proceeded slowly, and as the final day began, I was worried that I might have  been hasty in declining the offer made the first day, but hoped that the person would bid at least an equivalent amount.  Finally, when the dust cleared at the end, this one sold for just over $1800.  I still don’t know exactly what it is or why it sold for so much more than the rest, but at least I had made a good investment when I had bought it years ago. 

Most of my timing has not been so good; often I’ll buy things at the peak of their popularity and try to make a little profit, but then if I own them for too long I may lose money.  I own a number of quilts that I bought when the market was better than it is now, some of which will sell for a loss.  But since I’m not buying much at all these days, I’m constrained to selling items that we already own and have stashed away.   Hopefully I can unearth a few more gems at the right time to maximize their potential.

Years ago when I taught fiction writing, I once had in my workshop a member of the famous tightrope-walking Wallenda family.  Now there was a family with natural balance.  Unlike the plaids we’re considering this week.  These are unbalanced or asymmetrical plaids, these set diagonally.

We found one in five at least slightly different colorways, another in three along with numerous pairs.  As always, we can probably assume that since I only have about 5000 or so images among the 20,000 variations known to exist, there must be more variations of many of these patterns than what we show here.








In addition to the 11 pair shown at left and above, there are, of course, a half-dozen or so singles among our collection of images. And since during our exhaustive search we found only three images of unbalanced plaids oriented squarely or with the grain of the cloth, we’ll include those at the end of today’s group, since they probably aren’t justified in having their own week.

Of course that means we’ll have to come up with a new topic for next feedsack Friday, but that’s half the fun of it. No doubt there’s a source of springtime inspiration in there somewhere.
Remember, suggestions are always appreciated!

This week we have the last of the balanced multicolor plaids, those oriented square with the grain of the cloth instead of diagonally.  There are four colorways in one pattern,  a number of pairs, and a few singles at the end:

But we are by no means finished with the plaids,  just as among our friends, there are probably more unbalanced than balanced ones.

So next week we’ll look at unbalanced plaids, those with different colors and widths of line in different parts of the squares of plaid.  Hope you enjoyed this week’s Feedsack Friday!

This Friday we’re continuing our discussion of plaid feedsacks. This time they’re multicolored feedsacks in balanced or symmetrical plaids. We’ll begin with diagonally oriented plaids, the first a pattern we’ve shown earlier in our discussion of various colorways, as it appears in several different color combinations.



We’ve found eight variations of this one, though there are probably more.

All the rest have fewer, but there are several with at least three colorways among our illustrations, many, many more in twos and singles.
 

Here are three pair:


(more…)

Feedsack Friday is back again!

We’ve previously considered feedsacks with a checked pattern, the possible variations including color, scale, orientation. With plaids more variation is possible, especially the idea of the asymmetrical or unbalanced pattern.

To narrow the field a bit, we’ll begin our consideration of plaids today with single-color examples. Oddly, I found only one example of a balanced plaid with a straight or square orientation (in two different colors), but a great number with a diagonal orientation.



We seem to have found a great number more single color plaids in red than in other shades. Quilters don’t seem to use plaids much, though they can be interesting for sashing and bordering.

The single color plaids are certainly less common than the multi-colored ones; but of these, the balanced plaids shown above and at left seem to be much more common. We did, however, find a few unbalanced single color plaids, which are shown here.

Next time, we’ll show lots more plaids in a wide variety of colors. We’ll probably do one week for the balanced patterns, another for the unbalanced. And in case there should be too many to consider at any one time, we may also have to divide them by other criteria.

Way back when we first
started our feedsack business, plaids were distinctly unpopular, which is reflected by the fact that we, at that time, combined two of them in the same picture, the same pattern in different colors. At least now we give each feedsack its own mug shot!