Clean on the Cheap: Flour Sack Towels

Next time you need to stock up on pricey microfiber rags or disposable electrostatic dust cloths, opt for flour sack towels instead. Flour sack towels outperform microfiber and disposable dust cloths for cleaning and dusting all areas of your home. They’re large, absorbent, durable, and (perhaps most importantly) cheap.

What in the World are Flour Sack Towels?

They’re called "flour sack towels" because the tightly woven cotton used to hold flour from the mid-1800s through the 1950s was repurposed into towels, bedding, and clothing by the resourceful women of days gone by. 

Read:

• Feedsack Quilt History for an interesting history lesson.
• Funny poem The Flour Sack, by Colleen B. Hubert.

Where to Buy

Flour sacks are widely available at most drug, discount, and dollar stores.  Find them with the dish towels; look for the label "flour sack towels."  Perhaps in an effort to sound a bit more genteel, flour sack towels are sometimes marketed as "tea towels."  Traditional tea towels are made from linen–neither cheap nor useful for the cleaning tips listed below.  To make sure you’re buying a flour sack towel no matter what the label says, run through this checklist:

• 100% cotton
• Soft to the touch
• Thin (not like a cloth diaper)
• Appears to be lint-free
• Approximate size:  21×32 inches
• Costs about $1 per towel

OK, So They’re Cheap.  But Do They Clean?

Boy Howdy! I’ve been using a set of flour sack towels my grandma hand-embroidered for me for about 3 years. I use up the whole darn stash just about every day as I do general cleaning and trail after my messy kiddos.  I’ve been meaning to buy more, but they still look great after several hundred washings–and I use chlorine bleach, people!

I’m sure you all can think of many more super ideas for using flour sack towels.  Here are a few of my favorite uses:

• Dusting:
  • Flour sack towels are lint-free, making them ideal for dry-dusting TV and computer screens. 
  • Use them with furniture polish or lemon oil for dusting wood furniture. 
  • They hold onto dirt better than any microfiber/Swiffer-style cloth I’ve used, so they’re great for dusting ceiling fans and blinds.
• Baby: 
  • Bib: tie the short end around your baby’s neck to cover her body from chin to knees, or fold the towel in half for cup practice or messy foods for double-layer absorbency.
  • Burp Cloth: lip one over your shoulder to burp a gassy baby–supersized flour sack towels cover more of you (always a good thing when you’re in the line of upchuck fire). I did this so many times when the baby started screaming just as I started prepping dinner. Saved me 30 seconds from trekking to her room in search of a burp cloth–in screamtime, that’s 4 perceived hours.
• Kitchen: 
  • Lint-free flour sack towels are fantastic for drying dishes, particularly glassware, without streaking.
  • Wipe up messy kitchen spills: coffee, marinara, grease–I use them on everything, because the stains come out easily in the wash with a scoop of Biz or cup of Clorox, no problem.
  • Cover dough to keep it from drying out as it rises, or cover baked goods to keep insects and dust out while they cool without trapping steam inside as foil or plastic wrap can.
  • Weird but true point on sanitary cleaning: flour sack towels don’t trap hair (like cloth napkins and terry cloth towels do),so you won’t have to pore over your towels looking for icky stray hairs before you use them around food.
  • Dry lettuce and veggies after washing–just wrap the food in a clean flour sack towel and gently squeeze.
  • Note:  Don’t use fabric softener if you use flour sack towels for food prep–nobody wants their brownies to smell April Fresh!
  • Shine your faucet with the damp flour sack towel after you finish drying dishes, then use it to spot-mop the kitchen floor–3 cleaning tasks quickly done with 1 towel.
• Windows and Mirrors:  Have I mentioned that flour sack towels are lint-free? 

Pretty ‘Em Up!

If you just can’t hang with plain ol’ white, grab some embroidery floss when it hits 5 for $1 at Joann Fabrics.  Miss the sale?  Expect to pay a whopping 33 cents per skein.  You’ll also need a needle and scissors. An embroidery hoop is nice, but not mandatory.  Get a basic wooden embroidery hoop for under $2 at any fabric or craft store.

• Check out Sublime Stitching (tagline:  This ain’t your gramma’s embroidery!) for embroidery tutorials, kits, and patterns.   
  • Instructions are free online here, and also included with kits and patterns.
  • Reusable embroidery patterns are $3.50-$4.50 for sheets of retro-cool designs.  My faves:  Krazy Kitchen and Mermaids.
• Needlecrafter.com has a huge, searchable, and free embroidery pattern library–love the designs in the Geometric category.
• If you’re lazy, pay someone else to do the work for you.  Vintage Lucy’s has kitschy photos overlayed with subversive jokes on housewifery, like "Make Yourself at Home–Clean My Kitchen."  $8.50 each, plus $4.75 shipping on orders up to $40 makes these not cheap at all, but I thought they were so cool, I couldn’t leave them out!

Clean on the Cheap:  Get hundreds, potentially thousands, of uses out of multi-tasking flour sack towels for about $1 each, or as little as $2 all gussied up.

Paper towels, flour sack towels, microfiber, Swiffer–what do you use to clean and dust?  Join the discussion in the forum!

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Organizing & Cleaning.