Cotton and Thrift: Feed Sacks and the Fabric of American Households

Printed cotton sacks are currently fashionable aspects for material culture research, particularly in the costume and quilt history communities. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, these mass-produced sacks were relied upon by rural America as a valuable source of free fabric for clothing, quilts, and home decor.

This book is the catalog for the Museum of Texas Tech University’s Cotton and Thrift exhibition, which showcases the Pat L. Nickols Cotton Sack Research Collection. The Nickols Collection includes white sacks, printed partial and whole cotton sacks, swatches of printed sacks, instructional booklets, garments, quilts, quilt tops and decorated white sacks. Combined with earlier and subsequent individual donations, the almost 6000 feed sack pieces held by the Museum of TTU make this the largest collection of feed sack materials to be assembled by an American university, and likely the largest such collection in public hands.