3337 Ironing

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Science is neither a method nor a body of knowledge.
It is a body of changing, learned opinion, aspiring to be true.
There are certain facts about nature and history; our grasp of those facts
is constantly changing.
-- George Santayana --

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If something comes out of the dryer needing ironing, it's a very long time before that item gets worn again. I hate ironing! Some people find it satisfying or relaxing. Not me.

Goes back to my youth, I guess. In the fifties, almost everything got ironed. I can't think of anything right off that didn't. Well, socks. And stockings. My father wore knit undershirts and boxer shorts, and they got ironed. Bras got ironed. Bedsheets got ironed. Dishtowels got ironed. Hankies. If the bath towels were badly scrunched, they got ironed.

There was no such thing as permanent press. No blends. Almost everything was cotton. Clothes came out of a dryer wadded into balls, or off the clothesline stiff as a board with vertical creases and folds where the clothespins had been. Heavier cotton items could stand by themselves. Sheets were often starched so they would stay cleaner longer, and they were often so hard they could cut your skin. They'd go into the ironing basket, and the morning of ironing day you'd sprinkle them.

Wow, that's an old term - "sprinkle the clothes".

We didn't have steam irons (well, maybe rich folks did, but we didn't), so you'd dampen the clothes for ironing with a coke bottle with a sprinkler head cork in the top. Then you'd roll each item tightly and stack the rolls so the moisture could permeate. If it was going to be more than a few hours, you'd put them in the refrigerator so they wouldn't get a mildew odor.

Being the eldest of five kids, ironing the flat items fell to me as soon as I could reach the top of the ironing board. I got pretty good. I can iron a man's shirt on a flat board so that there is no crease down the sleeve. There's a correct order for ironing a shirt: collar and cuffs, back yoke, front yoke, sleeves, body, retouch collar and cuffs. You do the collar and cuffs first and last because they are dampest. And have to be sharpest. Or something. Never quite understood the logic.

Anyway, it was a never-ending task. I hated it.

Just before I left for college, there was an incident that made me swear I would never iron anything that wasn't my own personal property ever again.

My father was rushing to go to an important meeting. He took off his uniform pants (Air Force), handed them to me, and said to sharpen the creases.

I do that well. You lay them out, carefully lining up the seams top and bottom and inside the legs, fold the upper leg over the top, dampen the crease with a moist sponge to remove the old crease, iron up the inside of the bottom leg, front and back, turn the pants over, and do the same to the outside, then repeat for the other leg.

The crease doesn't go all the way up on uniform pants. It stops a few inches below the waistband. He had handed me the pants with the belt still on, and I had left the belt on, since I wouldn't be working on that part. When he walked out to the kitchen and saw me lift the pants off the board with the belt still on them, he was furious and knocked me across the room.

Hey! I thought he was in a hurry! There was no reason to take the belt off!

I realized later, of course, that there was no winning. If I had taken it off, I'd have been hit because it would have cost him time to put it back on. He just wanted to hit someone because he was nervous about the meeting.

So, it is now three husbands later, and I have managed to iron very little. You don't like wrinkled sheets? Fine. Iron them yourself. Permanent press arrived, and I got to be an expert at removing things from the dryer and hanging them before they got wrinkled.

99% of my closet doesn't need ironing, ever. Some things I have to pull out of the dryer before they're completely dry, smooth them with my hands and let them hang, and some things I know to keep to a very small load.

But something has gone kerflooey.

A lot of things that have always behaved are now coming out of my new dryer a rumpled mess.

The new house has a gas dryer. I've never had a gas dryer before. It has five levels of heat, and I'm using the middle one, and sometimes the seams are still damp when I pull the clothes out, but the body of the blouse is wrinkled anyway. Never had that problem with my electric dryers.

I don't understand. And after two hours of ironing blouses, slacks, and caftans this morning, I'm very unhappy about it.

(My iron is more than 30 years old, the spray and steam spit spitefully. I had to sprinkle the clothes! I'll have to buy a new iron. Many bad words being muttered.)
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3184 Houdini socks

Monday, March 7, 2011

Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
(When all else fails, play dead.)

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Z's comment on the previous post about dryer lint made me laugh.

I have some habits (sometimes I'm almost OCD), one of which concerns socks.

When I drop a pair into the laundry basket, I either tie them into a loose knot or tuck one into the other. So they live in the basket in pairs. When I sort them for washing, I untie them and put them directly, as pairs, into a net lingerie bag with a zipper closure, with a pin holding the zipper closed. They go through the washer and dryer in the bag.

When I take clothes out of the dryer, I take out the stuff that goes on hangers first, then the stuff to be folded, and last the lingerie bag full of socks.

I unpin the pin, unzip the bag, and dump the contents onto a table for pairing and tucking or tying together.

There's almost always ONE sock missing.

How? At what point could it have gone missing? Jasper's a mighty hunter, but even he's not Houdini.

Two missing can be explained - I probably mismatched/swapped members of two pairs sometime in the past. ONE cannot. Right now I have five orphan trouser socks on the shelf, none of which match any of the others.

I don't understand.

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Daughter has registered me for a "Grandparents' Education" class at the hospital this evening. At the time she signed me up, she thought it had to do with delivery stuff, tour of the maternity area, etc., which I would have liked, but since then she has discovered it has to do with stuff like "we don't put babies to sleep on their bellies any more", so she said I didn't have to go to be patronized if I didn't want to.

I think I'll go anyway. Maybe if I get annoyed I'll skewer them with some questions.

Off to the shower. I'll count my feet when I get out.
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3183 How do I have any clothes left?

Monday, March 7, 2011

"There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory."
-- Josh Billings --

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Here's something else I don't understand:

I wash and dry a small load of clothes, say seven light knit tops, one sweater, and two t-shirts that I sleep in. Folded, they make a stack about 10 inches high.

When I clean out the lint trap, I remove a ball of lint the size of my fist, even when squeezed.

All that lint came from those few pieces.

I have a LOT of clothes, some things are very old, because I rarely throw anything out. It just moves down on the "acceptable in public" list. So I can pretty much guarantee that every item in that load had been washed at least, at a minimum, a dozen times, assuming I wore it twice a year. More likely a LOT more.

How do I have any clothes left? Howcum they're not transparent by now?
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3172 Satisfaction, so easy.

Friday, November 26, 2010

"Facts have a notorious liberal bias."
-- Stephen Colbert --

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I don't know why, but there's something very satisfying about doing laundry in my new washer and dryer. I've been washing every bit of anything washable coming from the old house, partly because I smoked in the old house, but mainly because the old house was infested with clothes moths imported from the middle east a few years ago in some wool camel bags, and I don't want any moths in this house.

Fabric things that aren't washable, like carpets, get vacuumed topside, backside, topside, backside, over and over until nothing comes out.

Yesterday and today I mostly washed pillows. I have something like 12 bed pillows packed away from when Jay was sick and we needed pillows to tuck around him in bed to prevent pressure. I'm washing them one at a time, on the "heavy duty" setting with hot water, double rinse, and maximum extraction (1.5 hours!), and drying on high heat. I'm very pleased with the way they're coming out. Only two got lumpy, and those two are also the two that don't seem to want to dry completely, even after several passes through the dryer. They'll get taken apart to stuff decorative pillow covers.

Daughter wonders why I need so many pillows now, but on a queen sized bed I'll use four pillows, so with two queens and two twins, that's ten right there.

I have a feeling the water and gas bill will be shocking this month, but it's a one-time thing.

Right now I have a huge old hand-crocheted tablecloth in the washer (it may become curtains, or bedspread), and I've been feeling so virtuous I'm poking around for other things to wash. (Jasper? Here, kitty kitty....)

My new bed for bedroom #2 arrived this morning. I like it.

It's very sturdy for what little I paid for it. I like the simpler head and foot boards. I got the "low profile" box springs, 3 inches thinner than regular, because the regular box, although it made the bed look more luxurious, made the bed so high it was awkward for me to get in and out.

I have some mother-of-pearl inlaid tables from India that will be perfect on either side.

Now I need curtains in that room. Actually, I don't think I can sleep there just yet. The bed is new out of the box and it still smells of stain and varnish. I guess it will need to air for a while.

The quilt spread is made of sari trim. I've had it for a long time, but hadn't used it. You can't actually sleep under it because it has a lot of metallic thread in it so it's super heavy, but it's pretty. The camera just doesn't pick up the shine and richness of the colors.
I think I'll put some tassels on the pillows, and make a contrasting neckroll or two from some different sari fabric. Right now it's too much of the same all over.

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Current thorns:

• "All intensive purposes" - That should be "all intents and purposes" folks.
• "Doggy dog world" - Aaaaagh! Hasn't everybody heard by now how wrong that is?