Poor Mama. She was usually defeated before the battle even started. Daddy bought hog shorts at Gilmore's Store in Wallace and when it was time for that purchase Mama made sure to be there to pick out the sacks. The need to explain this is for the benefit of the younger generation. See, back, way, way, back, things like hog shorts (feed) and flour for biscuits came in cloth sacks, printed with pretty designs of flowers or strips of rainbow color. This cloth was very durable ( had to hold hog feed people). The Purina and Martha White Milling Companies knew folk like my family had to stretch a dollar to feed and clothe us. Ollie Gilmore and my Daddy were friends and Ollie being fully aware that Earnest and Ila would need at least two of anything they bought, made sure the delivery truck offloaded some "twofer's". I think he probably saved back some matching feed and flour sacks, especially for Mama. To the point, Mama made the choice of the pattern, Daddy paid the bill and we, me and my sisters got new dresses.
After the biscuits were eaten, the hogs slopped and the sacks emptied, they were washed and pressed of all wrinkles. Patterns for new dresses were pinned to and cut from for sewing pretty little dresses. I would lay at Mama's feet as she peddled that old Singer, poking my fingers underneath the trundle to the rhythm of her peddling. Her concentration to the job at hand didn't allow for my fingers and that contraption to meld perfectly. She would stop peddling to adjust her seam, the press would stop on my fingers and all hell would break loose. Squalling and screaming, tears and snot flowing, the blaming would start. "Mama, you mashed my fangers". Frustrated, Mama would snatch my butt off the floor, slap my legs into a good stinging and then hug me to her bosom until the storm passed. Snubbing lasted a spell.
After the dress was completed except for the all important detail of hand stitching a design of a flower, butterfly or some rickrack onto or around the collar and cuffs, it was time for the final task of rewashing, starching by dipping the dress into the dishpan filled with Argo. If the starch was perfect, the sun hot enough and we wanted to do so, the dress could be made to stand alone as it was taken off the clothesline.
Mama had hit it out of the park again. The dress would be sprinkled with water, pressed to a slick crisp, using heavy smoothing irons heated on the cast iron cook stove. I would walk the halls of dear old Wallace School come Monday morning wearing a new feed/flour sack dress. Every little girl that ever lived at the Barnett Crossroads during the 1940'/50's experienced this euphoria. Most often the dress was worn to church on the day before, removed immediately when we got home so as to do double duty come Monday.
Sack dresses came with a price, paid by the wearer. The starch stiffened seams would scratch the living daylight out of the wearer, me. Me being me I chewed my collar, my sash, my dress tail. Mostly I ripped out the hem in front from the need of keeping it over my knees. Mama tried so hard to make me modest, ladylike and neat, but that chewed and rumpled trait was imprinted in my DNA from somewhere back in the gene pool of the Smith/Grissett line. Mama tried so hard and failed so completely to get me ready to go out in public with some semblance of her effort showing. Bless her heart!
When our dresses were used until there wasn't anyone left to wear them or when the dress had become a Holy rag, Mama cut them into small squares to be made into quilt tops. Many cold mornings we laid in bed to count all the dresses in our quilts. From pretty little feed sack dresses to pretty feed sack quilts for keeping us warm and happy.
No such thing as second hand in my world, just used until it disappeared.
To this day, I can close my eyes and remember with complete clarity, Mama's pleading words, "Earline, don't chew your collar, you look like a goat, besides you are eating a perfectly good dress.
***Wish I had a feed sack dress quilt now.
