Don't buy generic cloth napkins! Sew your own!

Christmas is next week, so why not start a Christmas sewing project over this past weekend, right?  This at a time my Christmas shopping was not fully finished.  And it's still not, though the sewing project is done, so there's that triumphant accomplishment! (Post Script:  Now my Christmas shopping is officially finished. Thank you Target.com.)

It's an exciting Christmas this year!  For those who don't know, our very small family is spread among 4 states.  My brother and his significant other, Jessica, live in New York.  His daughter lives in Arkansas.  My dad lives in Illinois and we live in Kansas.  When my mother was alive, Christmas mostly centered around the family home in Illinois.  It was a "come if you can" type thing, but since her stroke and death, we've only had two family Christmases; one in Arkansas the year after my mother's stroke in 2005 where it was such a torn feeling to be happy we were all together and so burdened, at the same time, that mother was up in a nursing home in Illinois lying in vegetative coma; especially since Christmas was her favorite time of the year.  The second Christmas was a few years ago when we all made the trek to Illinois.  This was under the assumption that my grandmother was doing poorly.  Thankfully she is still with us, though that was a difficult Christmas, too.

However, this Christmas will be at the lake.  My brother and Jessica are flying out to Missouri and picking up his daughter in Arkansas and then coming up to Delavan Cottage.  My dad is coming down from Illinois and we will all be together for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, at least.  Hopefully longer!  This is the first time Delavan Cottage will really get a workout as a "guest cottage!"  It will be nice to spread out among the two cottages, just as I always envisioned!

There is no sadness this year just a complete nuclear family together at a place that I hold so near and dear!  I cannot wait!  So, as I've blogged before, I purchased an antique farm table for Delavan Cottage.  Though the cottage has mostly a mariner theme, I still like to incorporate vintage touches, especially through linens.  I have antique quilts folded in the cabinet that I hope will be used to keep everyone warm as we relax and visit with each other.  For the Christmas table, I was looking at using cloth napkins.  After shopping online, I decided I'd rather just sew up my own napkins.

When I go to auctions in the warmer months, I'm always scoping out feed sacks and grain/seed sacks. I just love the graphics, the advertising, the stains and the different material of each sack.  Even though you may find multiples of the same sack, they are never quite the same depending on the wear and the worn graphics.  Oftentimes, I have to bid on a large stack of sacks to get the perfect one I wanted which means I have a collection of worn sacks of all types.

Some of the better sacks I've turned into pillows and sold.  A few sacks are in my own collection, but when it came time to sew up some double-sided napkins, I turned to my more worn seed sacks because I knew I was going to use them and I wanted to see how they'd turn out before I actually cut up perfectly good sacks.

I also needed backing fabric.  It might have been last year or the year before when I had Spoonflower print up a yard of fabric each from an old 1930's advertisement from our lake neighborhood at the Lake of the Ozarks.  One of our part-time neighbors at the lake has the original advertisement which is a 3-fold ad.  I scanned both the front of the ad as well as the inside and sent the files to Spoonflower.  So two napkins have one part of the advertisement as the backing material and 2 other napkins have the other side.  The last 2 napkins have a sweet vintage calico print.

Now, before I show pictures, I want to reiterate that I chose the sacks that were in the poorest condition since I'm using them myself and I won't go postal if anyone gets a stain on the napkin!  Ha-ha!  And, since it's cloudy outside and my dining room table is full of Christmas gifts that need to be wrapped, I grabbed an antique tablecloth to drape over my cutting table for the pictures.  My camera needed to use the flash so the stains look worse in the pictures than in reality and the pictures aren't my finest work, but I wanted to get this blogged before I take the napkins down to the cottage this week.

Each napkin is double-sided and has a good weight, which I like in a cloth napkin.  They were fairly easy to sew by measuring the fabric to 18" X 18" and sewing right sides together with a 1/4" seam before turning right- side out and top-stitching both the seam and the entire napkin.

They fold nicely and look substantial:

I used a sugar sack for this napkin:

This clover sack is delightful with the yellow and red:

The Morton Hybrids sack is interesting because it's just black and white which I thought paired beautifully with the black and white 1930's advertisement of our lake neighborhood on the back fabric.  This pattern was the front page of the advertisement.  I love turning something that was paper into fabric and then using it in a meaningful way!

Of course I had to use a DeKalb sack!  This is the only sorghum sack I've come across.  It had a hole in the material, so I cut out a heart using bumblebee fabric (of course) and appliquéd it over the hole. Bees like sorghum, right?  ;)

Let's face it, there's something charming about flying ears of corn.  DeKalb has the greatest logo of all time until I came across this ear of corn airplane.  I mean, c'mon!  Isn't this the greatest design ever?  (Don't tell the DeKalb folks I said that. I'd never be let inside the DeKalb, Illinois city limits again!  ha-ha!)

This napkin is backed with what was the inside of the 1930's Lakeview Height's advertisement.

And lastly is this delightful corn seed sack.  I especially like the award-winning ribbon!

I love the idea of having two-sided cloth napkins.  You can reverse the design for a different looking table setting.  After the holidays are over, I may dig into my good seed sack collection and sew up more napkins and perhaps put some in my Etsy shop.

This was a super-fun project!

Avon, Farm Auctions, Dealing Antiques and Sewing; Oh My!

Boy howdy, am I ever busy! I decided awhile back to become an Avon Lady.  Seriously, isn't that the best?  My mother, rest her soul, LOVED Avon from as far back as I can remember. I mean I still picture the pink bathroom in our house on Perry Court in Sycamore and the Avon bottle of bubble bath shaped like a poodle, also pink, that sat on the corner of the bathtub.  Over the years, I opened many, many, many small Avon boxes to reveal a new set of earrings or a necklace.  The quilted bag I take back and forth to the cottage was an Avon gift a few years back.

Since her death, though, Avon has ceased and one day I decided to jump on the website and the next thing I knew, I became a consultant and at this point, I am my best Avon customer, but it always starts out that way, right?  Now that I've gone through 2 campaigns and earned a few customers, the newness has worn off and I must sit down to business and figure out the tax and stuff and the paper trail of running a business.  I am the creative brain, so this stuff is not fun but necessary.

Interested in Avon?  Check me out at jjacky.avonrepresentative.com.

In the meantime of gussying myself up as the Avon Lady, I'm also getting into gear for the summer farm auction season.  The first farm auction that I'm traveling to is this Saturday about a 3 hour drive.  There have been others this year, but the weather looks like it will cooperate and my husband has the day off, so hey, how about that?

I have been busy listing items left over from last year's farm auctions, so Etsy has become a popular place.  But almost the best of all, the sewing machine and I have become friends again.  The last 2 years have been busy and things got put on the back burner and my machine and I just haven't merged much. With the reorganization of my office / sewing room, I'm in the saddle once again.

Firstly, I needed to finish up some pending projects that I started and wanted to finish and then I got down to business and made a new shelf tuck or as some call a bowl ornie.

A few blog posts back I mentioned the 1925 Kansas Farmer advertisement I turned into fabric from Spoonflower.  The lady with her chicken and chicks is that advertisement that I sewed into pink and white feed sack.

What's so incredibly special about this feed sack is that it retains part of the advertising that was once on all feed sacks.  Ladies would purchase the feed and go home to soak off the writing so that the fabric could go into clothing and quilts.

It's just pretty amazing this is still intact.  Only a bit of it was on the feed sack and it reads, "Best Poultry" and has a picture of a cow and pig.

I filled with polyester fiberfill and added a vintage piece of lace to the side.  If you're interested, this piece is listed in my Etsy shop.

So between Avon, farm auctions, selling antiques and sewing, I also have to think ahead to the bountiful amount of yard work our lake cottage will be needing before Memorial Day.  I love being busy!  At the end of the day, my head hits the pillow and I'm magically swept away into dreamland and I wouldn't change a thing!

Simple Chair Makeover and Pig Pillow

We have an off-white wing-back chair at the lake cottage.  I'm not positive why I thought off-white was a good idea at a place where we play hard and come in dirty and often have to wait around for vacancy in our one bathroom to change a wet bathing suit.  Needless to say, we're often sitting in the chair making it dirty over the course of 7 years.  Awhile back I placed a crocheted vintage bedspread on the back of the chair but this year we needed something more.

I thought about making a slip cover for the entire chair and I still may but until then I wanted a quick fix that could be changed out quickly and washed.  Since I've been at the cottage for the past 2 weeks getting it ready for summer and sewing my little heart out for the shop, I had several feed sacks on hand.  I decided to grab one of my favorite worn feed sacks and tucked it into the seat.  I then draped over a vintage feed sack pillow cover over the top of the chair.  I love the look!

Now I need to figure out what to do with the arms.  Maybe I'll just wait until I can make a slipcover because arm covers often shift and look terrible after someone's been sitting in the chair.  This, though, was an extremely easy makeover that gives the chair a completely different look that matches perfectly in a casual lake cottage.

Speaking of casual, I made this pillow yesterday:

We went to a farm auction outside Florence, Missouri Saturday.  It was hot and very humid but we still waited till near the very end because there was a stack of vintage feed sacks that I had to have.  I was tickled when I won the bid!  After coming home, the sacks needed a good soaking before washing.  After they were cleaned, I took this one out of the batch and sewed it to a delightful vintage red floral fabric in the envelope style.  Inside is a large, thrifted feather pillow that is included.

I really do like all the stains on the front because I feel that adds authenticity to the piece.  In fact, when I cut open the feed sack, even after washing, straw fell out!  :)  That's about as barn fresh as it comes!

Wouldn't it look adorable on the wing-back chair?

It is, however, listed for sale here.

Feedsack Uses

You know the saying, "No matter where I roam; there is no place like home."

My mantra is slightly similar, though it doesn't rhyme, "No matter what I sell; there's still nothing like feedsacks."

It's no secret that I love feedsacks.  I adore their history.

I love the variety of feedsacks/flour sacks still in the vintage marketplace such as these that are in my personal collection:

The colors are still vibrant on this Beauty Bake Flour sack.

Once a flour sack, it now can turn into a pillow case!

This particular piece has the design for someone to finish by cross-stitching and then sewing up the case. The next one in my collection already has the design printed in color:

Just soak off the product sticker and you have a pillow case just ready to be sewn!

The two sacks above are a bit more commonplace, so you can only imagine my thrill when I found remnants of an old stamped feedsack at the bottom of a box full of quilting material.

It's rare for the stamping to have survived all these years since any contact with fluid will erase the stamp.

The sack has been cut all around the stamped design with the owner perhaps sewing up a baby's dress or even blocks for a quilt.  The ingenuity of the women continues to impress me.

In the same box, I found these two quilt blocks with the quilt pieces still pinned to each block.  The woman cut out the pieces in whatever was closest to her at the time; Sunday comics and lined stationary.

She used a delightful feedsack fabric for the butterfly quilt block.

This quilt block is just so sweet.

I listed the quilt blocks in my Etsy shop, if you are interested.  Please click HERE.              


There are so many things to love about collecting vintage items whether they are housewares, clothing or primitives.  But time and again, I find myself most enthralled with vintage fabric, especially feedsacks. I hope my love of feedsacks is passed along to you, as well.

Topeka, Kansas 1952

Yesterday I woke up to thunder.  I took that as a clue to stay home and work.  It doesn't hurt that I spied an auction Sunday in southern Missouri which advertises. . . *be still my beating-out-of-my-chest heart*. . . feedsacks!  Sigh.  :)  So, I skipped out on the farm auction north of Kansas City and was able to plan for this week's listings.

So, while I was pawing through my storage tubs, I came across a large bag of vintage feedsack quilting material cut up into various blocks, triangles, yo-yo's and such obtained way back in the Spring at a farm in Hiawatha, Kansas.  That was the auction that had a plethora of deer heads as evidenced here:

Remember when I mentioned earlier that every single farm auction has deer heads?  You may be interested to know, or you may not as I wish I didn't know, that the woman who purchased the slew of deer heads planned to "plant" them in her garden with just the antlers sticking out of the ground.

Hmmm.  I'll let you stew on that for a bit before continuing.



So back to my delightful bag of feedsack fabric. . . while I was digging around, I noticed a few pieces with sharp edges, so I pulled them out.

Attached to heavy card stock were small squares likely cut out for use in a quilt block pattern, no doubt, but what I loved most is the story.  It was 1952:

in Topeka, Kansas; March, to be exact, when Alice penned a letter to her mother.  She wanted to be sure that her mother knew that Patti and Buell were written to alerting them of the Santa Fe sale.  Alice mentioned that Babs and Leroy will be visiting in May and that the folks may come soon, too, but first are home selling off furniture, etc.  It appears her husband's name is Jimmie, and he just talked with Karl about Karl's new calf which had yielded them 5 gallons of milk.

But most importantly, it was a beautiful day on March 28, 1952 in Topeka, Kansas.

And, after the thunder and rain, the sun came out yesterday, October, 26, 2011, which made it a beautiful day here, too just about 60 miles east of Topeka, Kansas 59 years later.  

To whoever cut out the blocks and attached them to this letter, thank you.