EALDERCOTE 2.0

FEED AND SEED BAGS PROJECT

Unlike oil drums and wooden barrels, I don't have too many spare models of "bags" for things like cement, feed, seed, fertilizer, etc. In the steam era, just about every town or county had a mill of some kind that local farmers utilized. I tried my hand at custom creating my own, and I started with images of real local mill's brands to not only provide some detail for the railroad museum layout, but to complement the local flavor of my own layout (which has an imaginary interchange with the Central Railway). If you aren't sure or don't want to do the research, you can never go wrong with Purina bags as they were ubiquitous and still are.

I will stage one to three bags at farms or outside rural stores, but I have also stacked six on pallets as if they were being loaded into a box car or truck.

Find pictures of the brands from the era you are modeling. I model steam, so pretty much anything 1900-1950 suits my purposes. What size are the bags? The answer varies wildly, but a 50 pound bag of chow is usually around 3 feet tall, 6 inches deep, and anywhere from 20-24 inches wide. Next comes the sizing of the graphics. Most photos are going to give you a bit of parallax, so finding the matching logos and graphics of the sacks you want is the key. I scaled my graphics to .41" x .23" for the front of a bag. The overall graphics dimensions ended up being .82" x .4" I used Powerpoint to create templates of the bags--front and back, with a little extra to fold over for glueing. To get the "blank" areas of the bag a compatible color, I just used the color picking tool to select a mid tone hue of the pictures of the bags to fill in the template before pasting the graphics of the bag onto the template. Once your sack looks OK, Copy and paste as many as you want across the page. Print your bags in color. I tried a couple of different methods to create the bags themselves--strips of cardboard, folded paper, bits of spare plastic. It may take a bit of experimentation to fold enough paper to make the bag look like a reasonable size. An option I did not try was simply cutting pieces of wood or plastic to wrap the labels around. For sacks sitting on end, I like cardboard the best as it can be folded in a way to give the "bottom" of the bag a little bulk as if gravity is pulling the contents of the bag down. For bags that will lay flat, paper or a thick piece of cardboard do just fine. Cut out and glue the image of your feed sack around the bag form and let it dry.
Sample template	Creating the bags	Finished bag	Bags staged at the feed and seed