Wash and Iron
I don’t really enjoy doing laundry more than anyone else does but I don’t have a lot now that there is just me. I have a front loading washing machine and a dryer although I prefer to hang washing outside and let it dry naturally. The dryer is good for our wet winters though. There are still a few things I iron. Most people I know don’t iron any more and it’s not a favourite job of mine either. I usually wait till I have a basket load and then do it in front of the TV watching a movie or a favourite series.
Sometimes I bring things home from the Op Shop to launder. We don’t have the facilities to wash things at the shop and occasionally something comes in which has a stain or is yellowed from age but too good to throw out. As I am on town water and probably have more time on my hands than the volunteers who have families I bring them home to wash and iron.
On one occasion we were given several old tablecloths, they were very nice but stained and wrinkled from storage. I looked online to see if there was a way to save them and ended up boiling them in a pot on the stove, probably similar to the way that our mother’s boiled things in the copper. It improved several of them quite a lot and I even ironed them all. We sold the lot.
Good tip.
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If you put some Napisan or similar product in the boiling water it works even better. Of course those old cotton fabrics can stand very hot water because that’s the way they were always washed. Today’s synthetics would be ruined by it.
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I’ve inherited a few tablecloths like that, Vanda.
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Very nice tablecloths. I do quite a bit of ironing because I like things crisp. My mother would even iron my father’s tee shirts and the sheets and pillow cases. She kept a sprinkler bottle of water close at hand. I remember my grandmother having a boiler in her basement. She would also cook some type of paste starch and used bluing, which I would know nothing about today. They also used a wringer washer for many years. So much easier to toss everything in the washers nowadays. But clothes hung outside to dry always smelled so fresh. I don’t do that anymore, but should.
Every now and then I will still see someone has hung their laundry out to dry.
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I think you can still buy a product called Bluo which if I remember rightly mum’s generation would throw in with the whites to brighten them. I remember starch in aeorosol cans, maybe you can still buy it? But before that I think it came in a packet and had to be mixed with water. Mum had a washing machine with a wringer, or “mangle” as she called it. The boiler or “copper” was something every housewife would have been familiar with prior to plumbed in washing machines. Laundry was hard work in those days.
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