This is my first picture in use that I’ve found.

You can find it at http://www.togup.at

Thanks to Michi for this nice work!

Do you hang your laundry on a clothesline?

In our current house, we don’t have the space for a clothesline.  I long for one during the spring and summer months though.

My mama occasionally hung our clothes and sheets on the line to dry in our backyard.  I can easily still smell that clean, fresh scent in my mind’s eye.

A clothesline quickly brings to mind a more simple, relaxed time.

When mamas used clotheslines exclusively, there was no saying, “Hurry up!  We’re going to be late.” or “I’ve sent you a text message and an email.  Why haven’t you gotten back to me yet?”

Hanging out the wash gave women an opportunity to check on each other.  And it gave little people an opportunity to run off some energy in the evenings when getting the laundry off the line.

So why have we gotten away from such simplicity?

Too much work to hang it outside?  No space outside to have a clothesline?

Or worse yet: the Homeowner’s Association won’t allow it?

Laundry doesn’t have to be hard.  It doesn’t have to be mundane.

It can be the most rewarding task you complete today – clothesline or not.

Clothes lines on the attic

So, after a final shopping spree in Den Bosch (ashamed to admit I bought two pairs of shoes!), we are gradually making our rules effective. Yesterday, Eise made enough clothes lines on the attic to hang the two washing machines full of clothes we wash every week. No tumble drying anymore!

Last week we also brought my hiking shoes (which were a tad too narrow) to the shoemaker who streched them (in stead of buying new ones). I still have to test them (usually my toes start hurting after about 4 kilometers). Eise fixed our kitchen geyser (which also provides hot water for our shower) himself. He dismantled the geyser, discovered a broken part (a membrane of some kind), ordered a new membrane online (for € 5) and fixed it! And, thanks to Ellen’s suggestion, we opened three bank accounts at Triodos Bank, a sustainable bank (they even won the award for the most sustainable bank of the world this year!). I still have to order a Visa Greencard (waiting for our new bank accounts to be fully up and running) and then we are completely banking sustainably.

Today is the last day we could do some thoughtless consuming, but we probably won’t have time for it.

Have a great New Year’s Eve everybody!

..

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We do not use clothes pins in our house for the same reasons most people use them. We are not normal people. We use them to close chip bags. They work perfectly well. We have lots. No point in wasting good money on fancy chip bag closers.

I once used clothes pins for their intended use. Back when I was a good mom. Back when I was a cheaper scaled down version of Wonder Woman.

Many (I must rephrase many!) years ago, I decided that I wanted Dirt Man to put a clothes line in the back yard. I was full of energy (or maybe it was crap or something similar!) and would wash clothes early in the morning and hang them up before I went to work. Then, I’d rush home during my lunch hour and take them in and fold them. Was I crazy or what?

I think I was feeling the pressure of trying to be the best I could at everything and work full time. I had a friend who stayed home and made everything from scratch, kept her house clean, did all kinds of arts and crafts, and even found time to hang her laundry out to dry.

Growing up I had a friend who always put me down because we dried our clothes in a dryer, and she claimed her clothes smelled all earthy fresh from drying in the sun (and the wind and the rain and the snow…get it?). Bottom line was that her family didn’t own a dryer. And her jeans were always way stiff and they had to iron their clothes because of the wrinkles. No thanks I said I like soft clothes, and I got the same scent from fabric softener. She told me that was fake and I said I didn’t care. Can you believe how catty girls can be? Why would anyone be stupid enough to argue over the benefits of line drying or electric dryers?

While I did line dry the laundry, I had a problem with the undies flapping in the breeze for all the neighbors to see. Those got dryer preference…oh, and they were softer.

I probably did this for a few months. I never complained. In fact, I probably bragged thinking it made me sound like a super hero when I was more like a super freak! My allergist saved my life. He told me that line drying was bringing loads of unwanted pollen into our house and into our lives. He told me not to leave the windows open either. I didn’t do that…love that good old AC.

Dirt Man was cleaning out junk this past weekend and found a bunch of our castaway clothes pins. I promptly grabbed them, but not for the laundry. I knew I had a few bags in the cupboard that were in need of snug closures.

So, you won’t find me hanging the laundry out in my back yard. However,you may find me airing my dirty laundry, one piece at a time (undies and all!) right here on my blog!

Apartment Block - Singapore

I have mixed feelings about apartment blocks. In an idealised world, they are a low-cost way of living in the city, giving you lots of interesting neighbours (have I watched “Friends” too many times?) and a compact, functional living space. One of my university lecturers had a large apartment which over looked Hampstead Heath – it was super cool (you know who you are Ken). And then there is the reality of noisy neighbours and endless flights of stairs – and not really being very inexpensive.

I wonder how many people live here in this building. I think I written before about Singapore – and I have the feeling that this is where the “lucky” people live. I’m intregued by their clothes lines, which break up the uniformity of the building (are all the curtains the same?). This is actually about 4 photographs which I joined in Auto Pano Pro. I love “joiners” – I wish I was better at them.

Have you ever checked out Lindy Sue’s?

If you haven’t then you must go browse right now.

Although we’ve never met or conversed, I knew we were kindred souls from the moment I read “Lindy Sue is a laundry enthusiast.  She has devoted her talents to the quest for the perfect load of laundry.”

Ah… so refreshing to this lover of clean laundry.

Lindy Sue’s makes my southern self want to say, “Oh my word.  Have you seen her fabulous items?!”

These would make great Christmas gifts for anyone on your list.  Who doesn’t love clean clothes?

These are my personal top picks in no particular order:

Aren’t these the cutest ever clothespin bags?  I just love them.

They would be beautiful holding your pins on the line as you hang sheets.

I also like how you can use them as lingerie bags, hosiery bags, etc.

These are sturdy clips to hang in that cute little clothespin bag above.

For indoor or outdoor use.

This is a 20-page stain removal guide.
A great resource to keep in the laundry room.

What a well-designed laundry bag!
It has stain removal tips on the front and a guide to laundry care symbols on the bottom.  A genius idea in my opinion.

What’s even better is that Lindy Sue’s is offering a 20% discount!  Happy Shopping!

(Disclaimer:  I have no affiliation with Lindy Sue’s in any way.  I was not compensated through any means for this post.)

The star, who’s known as a great animals lover, said that her clothing pieces will be 100% organic. Moreover, the singer said that her products will be affordable for anyone.

“I am very pleased. We have a collection of clothes made of organic materials, which will have a price that allows everyone to wear them. I always wanted to have my own clothing line,” said Leona.

I did some laundry yesterday and it was on the rinse cycle when I left to meet up with a friend for dinner*. When I returned home my laundry was sitting in my basket on the floor. Apparently, someone else in my building needed to do laundry during dinner hours on a Saturday night. Odd, right!? My laundry was done but I was too lazy/tired to take it to the laundromat to put it in the dryer. (My landlord provides a washing machine but no dryer.) So this morning I see my laundry sitting there and I see the sun shining and figure, why not put it out on the clothes-line.

Right now, I’ve got my pajamas, a fleece hat, and a short-sleeve shirt hanging on the line and my boxers draped around the edge of my laundry basket sitting off to the side of my back steps. (I need to buy some of my own clothes-pins to be able to hang up more than a few items using the old rusty clothes-pins always on the line.) So we’ll see what happens with air-dried underwear. Like other stuff I air dry they will be stiff. But I hope they can be soft as well. Who knows, though. I generally use a fabric softener sheet in the dryer as opposed to liquid fabric softener in the washing machine. I’ve got a loaf of heavier stuff to wash now (wool socks, heavy shirts). I am sure I can get the shirts up on the clothes-line but I don’t know about the socks. They might need some heat drying to get them fully dry and to keep from getting mildewy. Nothing is worse than the smell of damp wool socks. Except for maybe the smell of a damp sheep. : -)

*We went to The Old Fashioned in downtown Madison on Capital Square. There was a long wait but we got a free beer and I had an awesome burger with smoked bacon and Wisconsin cheddar cheese.

blankets, people. Blankets! (Ha. Ha. Ha. Get your minds out of the gutter.)

I woke up this morning around 7:40AM to sun pouring into my apartment. This is the second of three days of unusually warm, and unusually gorgeous, weather in Madison. So, with a clothes drying line less than 10 feet from my back door I took the two wool blankets off my cot and hung them up outside in the sun to air out. It’s pretty windy today so I am letting them stay out there a while. I don’t have an official/authentic fabric beater like you would find in an 18th- or 19th-century home but the side of my broom seems to work just fine. I might just leave the blankets outside all day. They are made of thick, tightly woven wool so the chance to air out them is nice to have before they go back on the cot for the rest of the Fall/Winter season.

Below are some pics in case you don’t believe me.

View From My Back Door

Blowing in the Wind

Blankets Getting Mooned

Luckily my neighbors, like me, refuse to give into the cold weather. Here’s to summer!

Sun dried sheets

035/365

I hardly ever print any of my photos, but when I do, I hang ‘em outside to dry. This photo was a little difficult to compose because the background was not to my liking. I decided to shoot slightly above my subject and pick up the color of the leaves on the ground instead.

We have two rusty  “T” shaped sculptures in our backyard. They used to hold a clothes line I assume. They’re very securely concreted into the ground. They’re probably 50 ft. apart.

What should I do with them?? I need suggestions. Plant hanger? Hammock stand? Sculpture? Yank the ugly things out?

“I bet there’s more clothes than food in most everyone’s freezer today,” my grandfather said to my grandmother when they were first married and living in Northern West Virginia.

If you find this statement as odd as I did, you can rest assured Gramma was not talking “out of her head” when she quoted it to us at dinner. She was embarking on another tale of early married life. Of course, knowing that might not help you understand it any more than it helped me.

“Why were there clothes in the freezers?” I asked.

“If they were still just a bit damp when you brought them off the line, you put them in the freezer before you ironed them,” she told me. “Otherwise they might mold.”

Freeze-dried. Go figure. I googled it, and sure enough, there are some blogs and such that mention freeze-drying clothes, but most of them pertain to freeze-drying clothes on the clothes line in Winter, when of course the temperature was sub-zero. Gramma even mentioned how many times the clothes were frozen before she got them hung on the line.

“So, on a day when everyone has clothes in the freezer is because it rained?” I asked

“Right.”

Of course, that got me to thinking. Perhaps, I thought, the whole notion of freeze-drying them in the household freezer wasn’t just reserved for otherwise warm, but rainy days. Maybe they used their rainy day drying process in the winter when the thought of going out in the cold to hang the clothes on the line seemed too daunting a task. Just put them in the handy dandy new freezer we just got for the food, right? If I was faced with sub-zero temperatures outside, and damp clothes, well, a lightbulb might go off above my head with the thought, “you know you could always just freeze-dry them in the freezer. In the house. In the warm house.”

According to Gramma, those kinds of thoughts were tantamount to being bedeviled. In my mind it’s more like necessity being the mother of invention, but back in her day there were rules and protocols to all these little household chores.

“Monday was laundry day,” Gramma said.

To skip the clothesline part of the laundry process apparently told your neighbors, who were freezing their whatsas off at their own clothes lines, that you were leaving your clothes dirty – and watch out the next time they saw you wearing yesterday’s clothes – or something was horribly wrong at your house. Rain was apparently the only acceptable reason for using your home freezer to dry the clothes.  And unexpected rain, at that.  Otherwise you might have concerned neighbors knocking on your door all day inquiring on your health and well-being.

How different the times are, eh? Now we barely know most of our neighbors, and certainly most of us don’t have time to observe their comings and goings with the same eye they had then. The good news of that change: no one knows , or cares really, if you’ve put off doing your laundry, or any other household chore, until another day. The bad news: if you live alone and dropped dead of a heart-attack, fell in the shower, fell down the stairs, or something else happened, how long would it be before your neighbors were concerned for your health and well-being?

“You hung up the whites first,” Gramma explained. Now she was off explaining the protocol of clothesline hanging.

When googling the freeze-drying, I did find a protocol of hanging clothes on an outside line. Indeed, you hung the whites first.

• You had to hang the clothes in a certain order, and always hang “whites” with “whites” and hang them first.

•You never hung a shirt by the shoulders — always by the tail. (I think similar to getting shoulder bumps from some hangers today)

•Wash day is on a Monday!

•Always gather the clothes pins when taking down dry clothes. Pins left on the lines were “tacky.”

•If you were efficient, you would line the clothes up so that each item did not need two clothes pins, but shared one of the clothes pins with the next washed item.

•Clothes were off the line before dinner time, neatly folded in the clothes basket, and ready to be ironed.

 “And they had to be white,” Gramma continued.

By whites they are talking of the linen. And they were hung on the outside lines to use as a shield against everyone seeing your unmentionables, which were hung on the inside clotheslines. What Gramma means by “they had to be white,” obviously means they had to be free of stains – stains, or course, that all your neighbors could see and upon which they would all surely speculate.

Can you imagine the reputation you might get if your linen was hung up without being all white?  Or the reputation you might have if you hung your unmentionables on the outside lines for all to see? Well, obviously you would be a marked woman, and husbands everywhere would not be allowed within 100 yards of you without a chaperone. Your kids’ friends would mysteriously disappear and you would no longer be invited to the ladies social meetings.

Youtube, and tabloid mags, have nothing on what the rampant smear job of a neighborhood of women could do to someone who broke protocol on laundry day.

Good news: now is not then. I think if I lived then, I might hold a ladies social meeting, or at least bring it up at one of them – “Ladies, it is supposed to be under 20 degrees Monday. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to put my clothes in the freezer…in the house…to dry them. I’m just letting you know up front. If you want to join me, we can all do it.”

Bad News: Your neighbors might not care or know of your comings and goings like they used to, but they all have cameras and camera phones. As does the person standing behind you in the checkout lane, the person next to you at the traffic light….

I guess times haven’t changed that much after all. The focus has just shifted. So, while my neighbor is making sure his batteries are working in the camera so he can catch me tripping down the outside steps tomorrow, and he tries to resist the urge to sing out loud with the radio at the next traffic light he stops at, I’m thinking I have a dryer on the fritz and a relatively empty freezer. I might do some laundry.

My goodness how times have changed. When I was growing up my family had a laundry line that went from the house out across the backyard and hooked up at the end of the yard onto a very tall poll. My mom would do the laundry in the washing machine that was downstairs in the basement and then she’d haul it up the stairs in the laundry basket. Mom would keep a bucket of wood clothes pegs in a container by the back door that she would take out onto the porch with her and the laundry basket and hang the clothes out on the clothes line to dry. It was a “given” that in the nice weather, of which we have just had some very hot weather, all the laundry would be dried outside on the line. That was what families did back then, every one had a laundry line. Friends would come over to play and mom would have had everything, and I mean everything, hanging in the breeze. As I sit here at my computer and remember, I can recall several times being embarrassed because the whole families “unmentionables” were blowing in the breeze for all to see. Sure, lets hang out clothes and linens outside, but I would get so upset when my mom would hang my underwear up so the neighbors could peek at them and know what my unmentionables looked like. I can laugh about it now but back then it wasn’t funny.
Times changed, and certain neighborhoods got the idea in their head that laundry lines didn’t work with the “look” of the neighborhood. Hanging your clothes out to dry only happened in the poorer areas of town or in the pictures of the slums on television….or that’s the idea that was at times portrayed.
I guess the saying what was old becomes new again can also be true of laundry lines can’t it. There have been many challenges to this idea that hanging laundry looks bad as most of us, including municipal governments and Hydro companies are encouraging, are “into” saving money. As recent as April of 2008 the premier of Ontairo, Dalton Mcguinty stated that dryers use 6% of Ontario’s power supply and decided to lift the ban on outdoor clotheslines. Amazing huh, an entire province of people were actually banned from using clotheslines! Thank goodness that changed…money talks doesn’t it.  So now hanging your clothes out to dry has become almost “trendy”, or “hip”. What, trendy you say? Yup…in fact if you look at what your options are now for drying your clothing without a dryer you may be surprised! Some would say infact, we are behind Europe not only with our fashions but also when it comes to cleaning and drying those fashions.

Let’s have a look at the different options available to us to hang up our laundry.

#1 The old stand by laundry line is still available, where one end attaches to the house and the other to a large pole/post at the other end.  If you visit the website of the hardware store Rona, they have a very good post on how to install a clothesline post. Click on the “pointers” box and then the “greenwise choices” box to find the post.

http://www.rona.ca/

#2 The umbrella line. This is the laundry line that has a pole down the middle and the top folds out like an inverted umbrella although there appears to be many options to the old inverted standby.

#3 The small  round hanging line with attached pegs. This has been popular in the past with the grandma’s who lived in apartments and washed their stockings and underwear in the sink and then hanged them up in the tub over the shower head with this line. The price point on these are fabulous as I’ve seen them for sale for well under $10.00 in several different stores.

Remember those three options? They are kind of the standard. Well…there are many more ways to hang your clothes, the following are just a few.

#1 The Antonius. This is a clothes hanger sold by Ikea that looks a bit like a bakers rack that you hang from a ceiling with pulley’s. You would lower the rack down, hang up your clothes, and then pull it back up to dry them. This would be a great option for inside a garage, a laundry room, or outside on a patio if it was covered.

#2 Metal Folding Clothes Dryer. This is a dryer that I myself purchased from Real Canadian Superstore. I only have a postage stamp sized backyard so this one was a great option for me. Another reason I like this dryer is because it isn’t wood and therefore I don’t get any staining on my clothes that can happen with the wood ones. I also like it as it folds up for easy storage. I slip mine between the wall and the washing machine…isn’t that great! I think I paid about $30.00.

#3  The Barbantia Wallfix Dryer.  This is a dryer that you must fix to a wall and pull it out like a shelf when needed.  It will give you about 25m of line. The nice option to this dryer is that you can push it back against the wall when not needed. At the time of my research the dryer sold for about $170.00.

#4  The Three Tier Tower Dryer.  This is a metal drying rack that includes three shelves for laying out sweaters etc. and a bar at the top to hang clothes on hangers to dry.  The neat idea they had to add to this one is that it is on castors, and the price is right, around $35.00 from Canadian Tire.  The down side is that it won’t do a full load by any means but it would work for a single person, or maybe a couple.

#5  The Sundog Balcony Dryer.  This is a great idea for the condo or apartment dweller as the rack fits over the balcony and comes out like a shelf. This dryer retails for about $28.00 from The Sundog Clothesline Company.

http://www.sundogclotheslines.com/index.html

Today I picked up some very handy stuff for the journey:

• 2m stretchable clothes line with hanging hooks
  (59 NOK)
• a deck of plastic cards, which can easily be washed after endless drinking
  games (99 NOK)
• Cuticura anti-bacterial – for hand washing before meals in the outback
  (49 NOK)
• a small sewing kit (guess I’ll figure out how to use, if I should need it)
  (25 NOK)
• Lifesystems impregnated moquito net long-life EX8. The net came in a compact little bag, thus not taking up uneccessary space in my backpack.
  (349 NOK)

Domestic Apparel Project has one of their dopest designs back in stock! GET EM WHILE THEY HAWT!

Domestic is the same clothes line thats going to be producing the MC DEATH BEAR T-shirt! Stay tuned for when they drop!

Adding these to an aspie's peg container is downright cruel.

Anyone familiar with your condition will know when you’ve hung towels on a clothes line.

The towels will be spaced laterally and ventrally along and across the lines for optimal air flow.

They’ll factor the sun’s current position and its projected transit during the estimated drying time.

You’ll also consider the potential of wind to dirty the towels by blowing them against objects.

Even given the most motley collection of clothes pegs (differing in material, design, size, age and hue) each towel will sport matching pegs.

You’ll check progress regularly, adjust towels to reflect changed conditions and remove dry towels to benefit those remaining.

Though such meticulous care will seldom be appreciated, you’ll know you did your best.

Click the picture to go directly to an article by Arwen O’Reilly about Kombucha (picture is her’s as well! isn’t it awesome!!)

This article/recipe is for those of you who already own a kombucha SCOBY, or have access to getting one, and are semi-familiar with the premise of Kombucha Tea. I’m not going to make any health claims or any boasts about how awesome it is.

I will however say I’m a busy woman. And I take time, several hours a month, and put it into making kombucha, so you can draw your conclusions for that LOL

Making Kombucha Tea into Vinegar for home use

Step 1. Make tea – 4 tea bags for vinegar, 6 for drinking kombucha
Step 2. When tea is done, but still hot – add in 3/4 cup of sugar for each gallon of water
Step 3. You let the water cool to room temp.
Step 4. Add the tea to your kombucha tea starter, and the kombucha mushroom that you’ve put in a big container (5 gallon bucket, 5 gallon water jug, etc)
Step 5. Let it sit about a week and a half in a cool dark place.
Step 6. Using a pressure cooker or large 4/5 gallon pot, place a filter where you can dump the kombucha tea through it. I use a large cloth one over the top of my pot.  Run all the kombucha tea through a filter. When the cloth starts getting clogged with debris. I take it off and rinse it, then put it back on. I keep dumping the kombucha in the pot until I’ve got about 3 inches left in the bottom of my container (the starter tea) and the mushroom of course.
Step 7. Put the pot on simmer for about 2 hours if it’s a large pot. If it’s a pressure cooker, 20 min on 10lbs. The idea is to kill all the bacteria in the kombucha tea that make up the SCOBY or the ‘mother’ so no new one can grow.
Step 8. It’s now vinegar, run it through another filter, to catch all of the dead ‘mother’ particles.
Step 9. Place your vinegar in it’s storage containers.

I use vinegar all over the house. I use it as a hair rinse in the bathroom. It’s in several small spray bottles all over the house with some basil tea as a homemade ‘febreeze’. It’s in a gallon container in the laundry room to put in a downy ball for each load of laundry (it makes hung laundry less crunchy, helps eliminate problems with hard water, which is important to me as we use cloth diapers and cloth pads) We use it in cleaning counters, sinks, and most especially in cleaning hard water off of the shower walls, shower fixtures and toilet insides. I also give vinegar to my neighbors, who love it LOL.

Who isn’t aware of the influence of green movement today? Green is a term widely used to describe buildings designed and constructed with minimal negative impact to the environment and with an emphasis on conservation of resources, energy efficiency, and healthful interior spaces.  In Austin, you can’t escape news stories about the latest green initiatives.  And with the current economy, it makes sense to save on energy efficiency by using green ideas to trim energy bills.

Here are a few inexpensive green home projects which might perk your interest in going greener.

1. Clean your refrigerator coils.

2. Replace weatherstripping.

3. Install a programmable thermostat.

4. Insulate hot-water pipes.

5. Install a clothes-line.

6. A tube-type skylight.

7. Install a recirculating pump under your sink.

The Green Home Guide Web site www.greenhomeguide.org is a valuable resource if you’re interested in green remodeling.  Taking small steps which are practical to your household is a balanced way to implement green in your home today.