Rags

History has much to say about rags. In the past there were rag pickers. They searched in the refuse and collected anything that was useful, including discarded pieces of cloth. They were washed and bundled to be sold to paper manufacturers to make bonded paper. The rags were shredded and added to the pulp paper mixture before it was spread into sheets and dried into paper.

Rags were also sold and used instead of toilet paper. Many times they were washed and reused. Rags were also used for women’s hygiene each month. When the cloths became nearly unusable, they were tossed out for the rag pickers to collect and sell.  Some of the rag pickers did quite well collecting and selling rags, thus the phrase “from rags to riches” was coined. The dolls Raggedy Ann and Andy were created from scraps of material.

The term rag time was a syncopated music style that was introduced and became popular from 1895 and 1919. I am not sure where its origin was nor much more about its history.

Quilts were made from clothing that had outworn their usefulness, either because someone had outgrown the pair of pants, shirt, dress, skirt, or jacket or the items had begun to show wear or were damaged and could no longer be worn. My grandmother Rebecca Miner made a quilt for each one of her grandchildren as a wedding gift. When we visited her home, she almost always had her quilting frame set up with the sewn together pattern stretched waiting to be hand stitched into a quilt. Often when we visited, she’d give us a threaded needle and allow us to stitch the straight lines of the pattern lightly drawn on the surface of the material. She would stitch the fancy designs of the pattern.

What started my mind to wander down the roads of the word rags was my recent visit to a friend’s field to gather sweet corn for canning. He invited me and my canning cohorts over to gather a few sacks full. He planted corn at several different times and said, “I’ll be planted so much corn, I’ll be picking corn until the snow flies.” Among the rows of corn were weeds, many of which were rag weeds and since my excursion into the cornrow jungle, my allergies were kicked up several notches. Runny nose, sneezing, and pressure behind y eyes are the results, but the corn is canned and I’ve eaten several of the roasting ears.