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We used flour sacks for many
things. They contained about a yard of material. After emptying the flour
into a large metal can, I would wash and iron the cloth. Then hem all four
sides, by hand. Find a transfer pattern, iron it on one corner of the
fabric, find the embroidery floss and decorate the tea towel.
Other towels were used to store our winter supply of
sausage. Most of you know how hog killing time went in the early winter
months. Having cut the chunks of meat and grinding them in the old hand
cranked grinder, fastened to the edge of the table, Mother would bring out
the sewn little flour sacks. After the spices were added to the meat, raw,
we would stuff the sacks and dip them into the paraffin pot. These were
sewn shut and hooked together, to be hung in the smoke house.
Skin was called rind, we would render out the fat from
the odd pieces in the big cast iron pot, over a hot fire, that you needed
to keep going all day. The pork rinds would float to the top, nice and
crunchy to eat. The fat was used for all sorts of things, making soap and even
to add to chicken feed in the winter.
Other uses of sacks were to cover food. This is before
there was such a thing as plastic wrap, or even plastic for that matter.
Talk about feeling old, when I told my Grandchildren I could remember the
first piece of plastic I saw, they said, "Are you that old?"
When a family member had a baby, we would save and wash
up all the flour sacks for diapers.
Lou Anne Allen, Attended Moss Schools from the 3rd. - 6th. Grades. |