An interview with Sharon Stark

Please welcome Sharon Stark from Sharon's Antiques: Vintage Fabrics and The Rickrack Rag who’s agreed to do an interview about feedsacks. Sharon lives in southeastern Pennsylvania and has been collecting and selling feedsacks for more than 11 years.



Let’s start at the beginning. How did you get started collecting and selling feedsacks?

The feedsack business resulted from a number of coincidences. First, my husband and I have been into antiques for years, both separately and together. When we got together, he had a used bookstore and I operated a stand selling general antiques at a local antique market.

We started selling on eBay in late 1997, as the internet began to make big changes in the marketplace. One major change was in my husband’s field, used books, and it became less practical to have a physical store instead of an online presence. So we decided he’d give up the store and sell online.

He found free webspace and started a list of books for sale there, also listing with a service that included a national selection of booksellers. Since he had created the website for his books, he looked around to see what sort of website would benefit my business, and what items would lend themselves to sale online. While selling on eBay, we found that feedsacks (we had always called them feed bags) had begun to sell for more than the dollar or two that they usually brought around here. Since they were easy to scan (we didn’t yet have a digital camera), we selected feedsacks for our beginning web site.

You live in a great area of the country for finding feedsacks with lots of farms and Amish communities. Do you find most of your feedsacks locally or do you travel to find them?

We find most of our feedsacks at farm sales and auctions in our local area, though we have bought them from friends as far away as Nebraska and even California. We also scour local antique markets and co-ops for feedsacks. When the Feedsack Club was in operation, we were members and bought lots of them at the annual conventions. And as our website grew, we were sometimes even able to buy some on eBay to resell on our site.

As far as traveling, we don’t travel a lot anyway, but when we do, of course we stop at antiques shops and look for feedsacks and other textiles, but nowhere are they as plentiful as in our local area.

a lesson in color and contrast

Have any of you seen Timeless Treasures' new fabric collection named 'Lena'? And the pattern within named Daisies & Disks? Doesn't it look familiar? It should if you've been reading my blog over the past month. Remember that gorgeous feedsack I showed you from my trip to Kutztown a few weeks ago? This one—



Well, I was over at eQuilter.com this morning checking out some of their new arrivals and came across the reproduction, available in three colorways—orange and purple (shown at left), and blue.

I'm not even going to get into how uneasy I feel about modern fabric designers 'borrowing' old designs, changing a few details and colors and calling it their own (it's happened before). Or the fact that five years from now you'll be seeing this on eBay being passed off as feedsack by someone who doesn't know any better (I've seen that, too).

What bothers me most are the color choices. I believe I mentioned when I first posted my photo how I loved that the very bright red-orange flowers popped against the subtle gray background. Now look at the two colorways shown here. See how the background is the first thing you notice in the orange example, and how the background and red flowers fight for dominance in the second.

And there's something missing, isn't there? The dark navy accent color used for definition in the flower centers and for the striped half circles is no where to be found. And it needs to be there. When you have colors that are the same tone, you need an element to provide contrast, and the addition of a very dark color (or black) would have helped with that.

They were probably thinking that if they swapped brighter fun colors for the original gray, it would appeal more to younger modern sewers. Personally I think the older colorway, which is perfectly balanced to my eye, looks more modern than any of the new variations.

And FYI, I'm a grump about old classic movies being remade to appeal to modern audiences, too. One of my favorites is Father of the Bride with Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor. All I can say about the remake, also called Father of the Bride, is that Steve Martin is no Spencer Tracy :)

more feedsacks

It's been a feedsack kind of summer for me. I keep finding really pretty ones in patterns I haven't seen before and for reasonable prices, too. These are from my trip to Kutztown on Saturday.


The dark lines on this are actually a very dark blue, not black as I originally thought.


So much going on with this one; I love the contrast between the geometric background and the bright red-orange daisies on top.


I love the bright colors on this but the pattern is kind of a mess; it's a smallish piece and I'll cut it up for bags or tissue cozies.

Otherwise it was a pretty miserable day. It rained all the way there and most of the way back and my eyes were so stressed from driving in all that mist and water that I had to take a nap when I got home. But it was fun being back in Kutztown again and visiting some of the same vendors who were selling at the farmer's market when I went to college there many years ago. Most things were different on the main street, although a few shops were still there. A friend's house at the top of the hill is now a used book store which is sort of funny. She and her roommates were all big readers and their rooms sort of resembled a used book store when they lived there. Overflowing shelves and books piled up here and there. Hee :)

I found a few very cool needlework/sewing-related things that I'll show you in the next couple of posts. Stay tuned!

more feedsacks

A couple more finds from the show—


Blue floral—big roses? mums? I'm not sure what they are!


This feedsack has the best colors ever! I've also seen it in another colorway—hot pink, periwinkle blue, and lime green butterflies on a light blue patterned background.


A close up view

feedsacks

I spent some time yesterday washing my fabric-related purchases from the weekend. I did not iron anything, however, because it's was 90 degrees in my house! We're finally getting some hot weather here and it actually feels like summer... and then some :)

Here's one of the feedsacks I found at the show. I love the lime green flowers and I think I may have buttons that match them exactly so it's going to be fun to work with. If I can cut it, that is.



You see, this feedsack is still in bag form. In five years of collecting them I've only come across two or three that are still intact and I really have to think about whether I want to cut this. But it does provide a rare opportunity to show you what a feedsack originally looked like.





Each sack was made by folding the fabric in half with right sides together and then sewing (with heavy string) along the open side and curving around to the bottom. The sack shown here measures 37" x 21-1/2" so, when opened up, it will be 43" wide. When removed, the braid-like stitching leaves a row of small holes all around the edge. And that's one way to determine whether something is a feedsack —look for that rows of holes.



Here's another one from my collection that's quite small—about the size of a 10-pound bag of flour. It has the same stitching.





Feedsacks also have a unique texture and feel to the cloth. Once you see and handle them enough you can usually spot them pretty easily. And I love how some still have that clean, sweet farm smell—like hay—from the grains they once held. Sometimes that doesn't wash out—I have several feedsacks that, when ironed, release the scent again and again.

pretty feedsacks

Don't forget the Madison-Bouckville Outdoors Antique Show is this coming weekend in upstate New York (Bouckville is located on Route 20, roughly halfway between Syracuse and Utica). This will be my fourth year and I always find great stuff—with 1000 dealers how could I not? The weather is looking good so far, which is great. There are very few indoor booths (some large tents) and, believe me, it can be pretty miserable if it rains. The very high humidity we had one year wasn't much fun either. I'm hoping to find some great vintage fabrics this year.

I've been doing lots of updating to the Primrose Design website lately. There's now a fourth page of vintage plastic buttons, a few new pillows (including some smaller handkerchief designs), and lots of new trims (including shell braid in five colors and rick rack in the package and off-the-bolt). Remember the discount code (CUPCAKE) for 20% off your order!



Illustrating this post are some new feedsacks I won last week on Ebay. I've added the pictures to the Flickr Feedsack Group, which is a great place to view gorgeous feedsacks uploaded by members. We're always looking for new members, too, so feel free to join and start posting your own photos. There are almost 500 so far!

feedsacks

A couple of years ago I started a group (Feedsacks) on Flickr to catalog some of the 15,000 existing patterns of feedsacks. This was a project I started on my website (you can see it here) beginning with swatches from my growing collection of feedsack cottons. Then I got busy with other things and the whole thing got set aside. There's really no way I could ever get all of them anyway.



Lately, a few people have discovered the group and asked to join. And I've decided to try to inject a little life into the project again. I invited a few people who already had pictures of feedsacks in their own pools (Flickr-speak for a group of photos). And thanks to those new members who accepted, joined, and shared their photos this week! Stop over and check out the photos and feel free to join us if you're so inclined.



Some of you are probably asking "What the heck is a feedsack?" I'm not going to attempt to explain in detail because several others have done so already, and much better than I could have done. You can read all about them here:
Feedbags: From Rags to Riches by Joan Kiplinger
Feedsacks: A Tradition of Recycling and Repurposing by Kayte Terry
Feedsacks! by Kris Driessen
Feedsacks, Frugal and Fun by Judy Anne Johnson Breneman
Collectible Feedsack Cloth and Quilts: the Past Revisited by Patricia Cummings



The feedsack examples shown here are some of my personal favorites. I love the large scale florals in bright colors, but there are plenty of patterns for everyone whether you like small-scale florals, stripes, polkadots, geometrics, or novelties. And about that 15,000 number—according to one member of the group it's actually grown to 20,000! Oh well, what's another 5,000?