Team Feedsack?

Love 'em or hate 'em - feedsacks don't have many quilters in the middle! If you are Team Feedsack, you love them! You want to see them, to own them, to use them in your quilts. I love vintage fabric, and one subset of that love is feedsacks. I have my favorites, which reflect my likes in current commercial fabrics. I like color and I like bright. I like novelty prints. I prefer geometric to floral. That said, I'll share some of my favorites & maybe even some of my not-so-favorites!

What's not to love about this Hawaiian print! Think vacation, relaxing, sitting on the beach!

Or maybe a vacation cruise is more your style? Sailboats anyone? I was excited to see this feedsack on Page 81 of Susan Miller's Vintage Feed Sacks! And again in a different colorway on Page 91.

My geometric favorites are plaids. I LOVE LOVE LOVE 1950s plaids! This yellow and black plaid feedsack makes me want to make a yellow and black quilt. Or maybe I should work on the yellow and gray quilt already started?

Here is another interesting geometric. I'm not too wild about the color scheme of Avacado Green and Harvest Gold, but the design is funky!

I'm not into floral fabrics - this sunflower feedsack is an exception. Probably that grid behind the flowers makes it more appealing to me!

I have to show you some floral feedsacks because they are really popular with everyone but me. I don't hate them, I just don't love them!

You can find most of these feedsacks and other vintage fabrics on my website. Feel free to browse, even if you are Team I Hate Feedsacks! I'm hoping I can make a few people think differently about feedsacks!

A Month of Feedsacks

I often notice that snippets of my life have themes. Several years ago, I found feathers on my daily walk almost every day for a month. Not before or after! Another time, it was bone china teacups. My sister's collection grew a bit! This month the recurring theme is feedsacks - those love 'em or hate 'em fabrics from the 1930s and '40s. Some quilters remember wearing clothing made from feedsacks, some collect them, others use them because they love the fabric designs. My Feedsack Month started when I visited the Homestead Monument in Beatrice, Nebraska. I bought a copy of Vintage Feed Sacks by Susan Miller in the gift shop. It's a wonderful reference book, filled with photos and descriptions. If you are a collector or a user of feed sack fabrics, I recommend this book, if just for the drool value!


The feedsacks I've found this month have ranged from 5" squares to complete bags in wonderful designs! The first was this sunflower feed sack. The flowers are overlaid on a gray grid. It is still in bag form and in excellent condition.

Feedsack #2 is a yellow and orange plaid overlaid with a brown vine. The stitches were taken out, but the holes are still quite obvious.
And the most wonderful find this month was this Hawaiian print: I LOVE the hula dancer!