I was born in 1946, and did not have knowledge of grain or flour sacks, but some of these posts have sure brought back memories. I was one of ten children and we shared our home with my grandfather, uncle, and great aunt. Mom didn’t make our clothes but would alter them to pass down from one child to another. Being the third girl from the oldest I wore lots of hand-me-downs. My aunt made the quilts and we used them piled one upon another to keep us warm on the long bitter cold Massachusetts winters. We had no central heating, no hot water, and a water closet over the toilet in the bathroom. Mom had to heat the water on the stove to wash the dishes, do laundry and our “Saturday night baths”. Mom would stick three to four girls in the bath at a time and we would play until the water was cold and our fingers shriveled up. We had a centrally located (living room) coal stove and a wood burning stove in the kitchen. My aunt made the best tasting toast on that wood stove. Grandpa’s favorite breakfast was bread broken up in a cup of tea with milk. I understand that the habit came from the depression years. We always walked to school (over a mile) in freshly starched dressed, all six of us girls. But getting dressed in the morning was tricky as during the winter we had to grab our clothes and run downstairs to dress by the fire. We could actually draw and write with our fingernails into the ice that formed on the inside of our second floor windows. I remember watching from the window at dusk when the gentleman would go up and down the street lighting the gas street lights. We had a milkman. Bread man and ragman that made the rounds. In the ‘dog days’ of August, the milkman would chop off big blocks of ice and we kids would sit on the steps sucking on the ice with the water running down our arms.
Thanks for the memories and those that have shared their pictures of quilts! Beautiful!