MAC’s sacks (Flour bag exhibit)

Before “going green” was trendy, generations of Americans lived like conservationists.

If something broke, it was fixed, not merely replaced. When a vegetable was in season, there were a dozen ways to prepare it for dinner.

And, during the decades when flour was sold in cotton sacks, women sewed dresses, aprons, towels and even underwear out of the bags once they were empty.

“It took three identical sacks to make a dress,” says Kathy Holte, a volunteer who is researching Spokane’s history with flour for the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture.

The MAC has a small collection of flour sacks from the Spokane Flour Mill, which operated from 1900 to 1972 in the building at 621 W. Mallon Ave., the Spokane landmark that now houses retail shops, offices and Clinkerdagger restaurant.

Museum curators hope to find more flour sacks, especially from other Spokane mills, including Centennial Mills, which Holte is researching now. They’re also looking for vintage garments made from flour sacks. As popular as the trend was from the 1850s through the 1940s, the MAC doesn’t have a single example of it.

Holte’s hope is to incorporate flour and flour sack artifacts in the museum’s permanent Spokane Timeline exhibit, perhaps as a feature in the rotating display in the center of that room.

“When we first started, we thought we’d put a couple of flour sacks up on the wall, but the more research I do on this, the more I see how flour was such a big deal in this area,” Holte says.

A really big deal. In 1900, Spokane ranked seventh in the United States for the amount of flour it milled, Holte says.

She has been especially fascinated to learn of the lengths the flour companies would go to secure monopolies in Asian markets, once even agreeing to sell flour for less than it cost to produce and ship it, just to squeeze out rival mills in Portland.

Flour companies also competed heavily for customers at home, and one way to earn the loyalty of families was to print pretty designs on flour sacks that translated well into garments.

Spokane Valley resident Arlene McComas doesn’t have any vintage flour sack dresses to add to the MAC’s collection, but she’s doing her part to revive the tradition of reusing the old bags.

McComas makes aprons, tote bags and other items from vintage flour sacks and sells them at craft fairs, including at the recent Farm Chicks Antique Show.

“(The fabric is) so lovely,” she says. “It’s soft, and it already has a story.”

About 15 years ago, McComas purchased hundreds of flour sacks from a flour mill in Idaho that was converting to paper bags from cotton.

She was raised on a homestead in Southern Idaho, and says she was taught to either “make do, or do without.”

“We made things do,” she says.

After acquiring the bags, McComas, who is 60, pushed them aside and went about the business of raising her children. She has always had “busy hands,” though, and a couple of years ago her son encouraged her to tap into her creative side.

“He said, ‘Just give yourself permission to play one night a week,’ ” she recalls. “I brought out a box of sacks, and play I did.”

Since then, she has been selling her flour-sack creations at craft shows and through her blog, www.heartrockshome.com.

In addition to aprons and tote bags, McComas makes what she calls “teaching dolls.” They’re meant to become part of a family and to be tools that help parents teach young children manners and life lessons.

“Like at suppertime, if everyone is having a cranky day, the doll can say she’s upset by all the screaming in the house,” McComas says.

She uses every bit of the original bags in her projects, down to the thread. When only small scraps of fabric remain, she wraps them around wooden clothespins and draws a face on the clothespin heads, creating charming little dolls. The fabric from the sacks, after all, is too precious to waste, she says.

“These sacks have a story and are connected to a time when we lived more simply, when things weren’t so disposable,” McComas says.

She says she’s not out to repair the ozone with her reuse-it tactics.

“It’s just about respecting what we already have,” McComas says.