I have a questions about flour sacks used for selling flour and sugar. Didn't the flour and sugar seep out of the fabric??? I don't ever remember my Mom buying flour and sugar in fabric sacks, before my time maybe, I'd imagine, I'm 54. Did you actually get a lb. of food if it was packaged in fabric sacks??? Just a silly question I've always wondered about.
I'm a sack collector and have found sacks used for flour, salt, alfalfa and clover seed, chicken mash, dog food, scratch feed, horse supplement, and sugar. Except for salt, these bags were large, 50 lbs or less. I have some beautiful (at least to me) coarse but closely woven bags that were 'returnables' which I think were sent to bakeries using large amounts of flour/sugar and then went back to the mill. Many were printed with a very attractive company logo and contents in two colors on natural fabric. The housewife could then wash/boil/bleach off the printing and have a nice piece of goods for whatever purpose--pillow slips, tea towels, underclothing, quilts. I'm sure if you tossed the flour sacks there would be a 'puff' of flour but not spillage as they were securely chain stitched. A lot less spillage than modern paper bags.
The all over printed feed sacks that were used for clothing were, in MHO, more coarse than regular dress goods and according to the literature of the time, dressing in feed sack material marked you as "country." The companies did their best, though, to produce attractive (for the time) patterns knowing that nice looking material could tilt sales in their favor.