Crafting burlap coffee bean bags and purchasing a burr mill...

Pretend burlap bags are stuffed with cotton and used for play
in a children's market stall.

       Our family nursery has so many old-world props for grandchildren to play with while learning about Midwestern history and culture. Below are directions for making very simple burlap bags to contain pretend food stuffs like coffee, flour, potatoes and rice. And I have also purchased a coffee grinder at resale for $3.00 to teach the kids how coffee and flour were processed in small amounts prior to the invention of electric grinders.

       Burlap is processed from jute or hemp. Before the Civil War, my family farmed hemp in Missouri. Hemp is like the industrial version of jute. Hemp was sometimes used to make bags for storing and transferring all kinds of food product to market. It is most often used now to make rope and durable carpets. Jute, which is a similar plant, was used to make fabric for ticking (a utility fabric). Over time, paper bags, tin cans and foil bags replaced burlap in the shipping and storing of coffee to the general public, because these were much cheaper to manufacture.

       Although the early burlap bags were printed in mass manually with the use of a silk screen, our simple process will achieve a similar result with art supplies easily found in every American home.

The coffee grinder in our family nursery is new but it's design
dates back to those burr mills manufactured just after The
Civil War. It is one of many interesting kitchen tools that is
displayed in my old-fashioned, play kitchen.

 Supply List:

• Off-white burlap fabric, 3/8 yard (Use scraps if you have them instead)
• a black permanent Sharpie marker with a wide tip
• dental floss
• embroidery needle
• heavy twine or a red yarn alternative
• a plastic bag or tin foil
• cotton batting
• paper grocery bag with red printing (optional)

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Cut the burlap to whatever size you would prefer for this easy sewing craft. Mine are approximately 12" x 6".
2. Use a sheet of plastic or tin foil to protect whatever drawing surface you wish to work on top of. This is because the weave of burlap is very loose and the permanent ink marker may transfer to the surface beneath the burlap while you are lettering your design.
3. I drew my letters with a soft number 2 pencil before tracing over these with a black, permanent ink marker.
4. It's important to use a wide tip marker so that this tip will stand up to the rough surface of the burlap while you press into it.
5. It is also important to work on top of a off-white colored burlap in order for your ink based lettering to show up well.
6. I also added a few, small coffee bean graphics to my sample, burlap bag shown above. I also stapled a strip of paper trim to the rice bag version, just to add a bit of color to it.
7. Sew around the circumference of of each bag several times with a machine straight stitch, leaving a big enough opening to turn the bag right sides out.
8. Stuff your bags with cotton batting and then use a whip stitch with dental floss to seal them up. This floss is very durable and will keep the loose burlap threads tightly bound together.
9. Now add a bit of red thread trim using an embroidery needle if you'd prefer.

       Burr mills were commonly used in early American kitchens. A burr mill, or burr grinder, is a mill used to grind hard, small food products between two revolving abrasive surfaces separated by a distance usually set by the user. When the two surfaces are set far apart, the resulting ground material is coarser, and when the two surfaces are set closer together, the resulting ground material is finer and smaller. Often, the device includes a revolving screw that pushes the food through. It may be powered electrically or manually.

       Burr mills do not heat the ground product by friction as much as do blade grinders ("choppers"), and produce particles of a uniform size determined by the separation between the grinding surfaces.

       Food burr mills are usually manufactured for a single purpose: coffee beans, dried peppercorns, coarse salt, spices, or poppy seeds, for example. Coffee mills are usually powered by electric motors; domestic pepper, salt, and spice mills, used to sprinkle a little seasoning on food, are usually operated manually, sometimes by a battery-powered motor.

Left, The first coffee-grinder patent in the United States was issued to Thomas Bruff, Sr. in 1798.
 Right, English and French coffee grinders in the nineteenth century.

The photograph above shows coffee grinders or burr mills kept in a Museum in Wisconsin.
The photo itself was taken in 1873. On the far right you can see a burr mill similar to the one
we have on display in the Grimm nursery.

If you like, you could add stenciled images to your burlap bags.

This process achieves a similar effect to those older designs 
using a silk screen, without the equipment needed to develop 

that printing process.