Crowd turns out to see History in a Cloth Bag

KALONA — Around 60 visitors showed up for a tour of the ‘History in a Cloth Bag’ exhibit at the textile museum Friday afternoon, one of the last groups to visit the display before its take down on Feb. 1.

A third of those guests traveled as a group from the Washington Public Library.

“It’s kind of a kick off to our fiber arts February, starting next month,” Washington Assistant Librarian LeAnn Kunz said. “The exhibit’s only going to be up until the end of January, so we wanted to get in on that.”

Kunz called the visit a “field trip” for adults. All 20 seats in the group’s van were booked in advance.

“I approached (Michael) Zahs to see if he would be willing to give a tour, and then we decided it would be nice to take a van for people who needed a ride there,” she said. “He has even more things than he ever had before or was able to bring to the library … it’s a way for us to help the community get an opportunity to see it.”

Michael Zahs, who gave the exhibit tour Friday, said the items showcased a facet of everyday life in American history.

“Cloth bags started being used in the 1890s, they replaced barrels and wooden boxes and they became the main container for all kinds of commodities,” he said. “Milling companies learned that women, particularly farm women, were reusing the bags for other things, like towels. So then they started putting prints on the bags to make their particular bag more desirable … it was not uncommon for people to say in the ‘30s and ‘40s that every bit of fabric in their house, regardless of whether it was clothing or curtains or rugs or whatever, had been a sack at one time.”

More than that, Zahs said the exhibit gave insight into the events of the period.

“You can learn what was on peoples’ minds at the time,” he said. “Bags that came out during World War II sometimes had the battles of World War II on them. And it was a way of test marketing fabrics, there’s different colors that hadn’t been used before, there’s patterns that (were) introduced in the 1930s, and it’s just a slice of history.”

Zahs said the display included 73 quilts made from the bags, a few thousand stand-alone bags, and historically significant furniture and other items from the time.

With the exhibit coming down Feb. 1, many of its featured items are marked for relocation.

“Some things will stay at the museum, some things will go to a different exhibit and some things will be packed away for a while,” Zahs said. “This exhibit has never all been up before, and it will likely never all be up again.”

Kunz said the visit was a great way to kick off the library’s annual programming theme of fiber arts.

“We’ve got a whole slew of things coming up here in February,” she said. “There are workshops people can come to, presentations people can attend, and we’re going to have a whole bunch of exhibits. I just put up a whimsical exhibit … ‘Outer Space in the Case.’ Our sticks and strings group that meets regularly, knitters, quilters, and cross-stitchers, they create the things for that exhibit.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com