In those days, flour sacks was kinda purty. They might come printed up with flowers on em, or birds.

[…] who would not chuse […] to have rather a lank purse than an empty brain […] ?

If we allow the coordination figure to be a quasiregular polyhedron (a polyhedron with one kind of vertex and edge, but two kinds of face) there is just one possibility compatible with translational symmetry – a cuboctahedron.

to roast a potato in ashes