Hanging out...

It's a breezy day in the country today -- let's say stoutly breezy.  In fact, downright Windy!  I needed to wash work clothes and kitchen laundry, and since there's sunshine and a "breeze," I'm all about hanging out.  I've always been one of those lazy renegade clothesline people who leaves her pins on the line to weather and wear, but after this winter, I'm going back to the clothespin bag.  I found that the old pins were leaving greasy, black marks on my clothes.  Pooh!

I made myself a simple clothespin bag out of one of the legs of my old favorite jeans.  I found the good tutorial at Gwenny Penny and did everything she did except instead of the cute pocket, I added a well-worn and well-loved embroidery from an old dish towel that my daughter embroidered when she was a little girl.  I had been saving that dish towel and using it for years, and today it got a new purpose --  a decoration for my clothespin bag and a sweet reminder of those 5 li'l chicks of mine who were the best helpers ever!  They were known to help hang out the laundry or take it off the line when a dusty wind was coming or when rain clouds were looming.

This isn't much of a pretty little sack, but it's a worker and it's practical.  I added a little clip to the belt loops so I can slide it down the lines as I pin the laundry, or I can clip it securely closed and hang it on one end of the clothesline when we have a stout breeze like today so the pins won't spill out. 

Are you a line dryer or a tumble dryer?  Or both?  Tell me your tips and tricks.

Blowin' in the wind....

 

I've been thinking a lot about the wind lately.  When you live on the prairie, you do that.  There's so little that stands in the way of the wind that one has to take account of it every single day.  So many, many things depend on the wind and the direction it's coming from.  It was said that when we had a strong east wind, it meant that there was a storm on the way, but this year that old belief has come to naught.   There was hardly a storm at all no matter the wind direction, and we didn't lack for wind.

Wind is what took a lightning strike in our north pasture and blew it up into a prairie fire that blazed for seven miles.  Neighbors from upwind and downwind where there ready to take action.  Thankfully, we did get a rain that day that took the fire down almost entirely.  

There was a wind storm that blew over us a week or so after the fire happened, and it was such a gift.  As we watched dust and tree limbs blowing, we saw something else which looked like another fire had started.  It looked a lot like smoke, but what was blowing in the wind was soot from the fire.  All that smelly, dirty, oily stuff blew from the pastures to Who Knows Where, and gave us a cleaner place to start fencing on this summer.  The men were dreading going out there to repair and rebuild fence, but now the range is sort of clean and it's even sprouting some green grass.

When you live on a ranch and you're out looking for livestock, it is most likely that you will find them upwind on a hot summer day.  Sheep and cattle prefer to walk into the wind to stay cool rather than walking with the wind.  Sheep also prefer to sleep on the highest places as a means of protection to the herd so they can catch the scent of predators in the wind and so they see everything below them. Aren't they smart?  It is said that livestock can smell water so wind again is important when taking young livestock to new pastures, however we always take them to water so they can figure it out a little better.

We plant shelter belts to protect our homes and buildings from wind and to protect livestock from high winds and snow.  The trees provide shelter against the prevailing northwest winds, but can also protect from easterly winds depending on which side of the trees you are.

Closer to home, I am constantly checking the wind when I hang out the laundry.  A few days ago, NumberOneSon shot a skunk just north of our house, and even though he took it away, the odor lingered enough that I hesitated to hang my clothes on the line.  I waited until the wind switched from the north to the west and managed to keep the stink off the fresh, clean clothes.  I also take note of the wind direction when deciding which line I will begin hanging the clothes from first; I always want to pin clothes to the downwind line so I'm don't have clothes flapping me in the face when I pin them up.  The same rules apply when I take the laundry down. I try not to hang clothes out when I know the men are going to be driving on the road next to the house because of the dust. I really don't have set rules about hanging clothes, but it's something that just comes naturally when a girl's got to battle the wind all the time. 

Setting sprinklers has a wind factor too.  Most of the time, I don't water on windy days since the majority of the water is apt to evaporate rather than soak in.  If I do water on a windy day I always set sprinklers upwind so the majority of the water goes onto the flower bed or veggie patch or whatever it is that I'm sprinkling. 

The mailbox is another place where a prairie savage like me has to consider the wind.  When I set letters in the box to be mailed, I have to think about our mailman opening the box and the wind whipping inside there.  Most of the time before I ever put the flag up, I set a rock on the mail because so often when you open a mail box that is located on a hill, the wind will catch the letters and bills and it'll fly right out of there!  I've chased a few pieces of mail down and it's a challenge.  I wonder if my mailman is glad that I keep a rock in the mailbox?

In the fall when the leaves are coming off the trees and it looks like a dump truck just tipped a one ton load of leaves in my yard, I don't worry too much about raking because I know sooner or later the wind will whisk them away!  Wintertime we really have to pay attention to winds.  Winds with cold and snow can freeze up water tanks and can send livestock drifting with the winds. 


Last week we pregnancy tested 199 heifers.  I wanted a record of it here in my journal.  It really doesn't have anything to do with the wind because we always work livestock in the barn.  But then again, it does.  We set up the corrals and barn that way so we don't have to always fight the wind, rain, snow and sun whenever we have to pregnancy test or brand or weigh bulls or any number of things.  Our lives really are built so much around the weather.

Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.   ~Arthur Golden

The laundress...

 

I've been thinking a lot lately about laundry.  I know it's not the most popular topic, but if you run a household,  laundry is something you must deal with on a daily basis, so let's talk about it.  All of my married life, I've been in charge of the laundry even though I didn't ask for the job.  My hubby went from his mother doing all of his laundry to his 19 year-old wife doing it.  Someday I'll teach him.  All these years of washing, hanging out the clothes, and pressing shirts, and I am still learning things about getting whiter whites, banishing arm pit stains, removing oil stains and much more.  

Since today is the first official day of summer and because I want to wear my favorite, white summer tops, I need to talk about armpit stains.  This is a troublesome thing for me and always has been.  You'd think that my husband and our four hard-working, hard-playing sons would have had pit stained shirts, but no, it was us girls that always did.  I figured that I was just doomed to  pit stains and would have to throw away my white shirts at the end of every summer. Well, yesterday while I was sniffing around a few laundry links (pun), I came to this one and watched their video on removing stains -- which included armpit stains.  Today, I tried it out.  I dribbled some liquid laundry detergent directly on the pit stains, rubbed it in and then poured boiling hot water from the kettle right over the stains.  Then I added in a cup of white vinegar to the tub and with more boiling hot water and let the shirts soak for a couple hours until the water was cool.  I dumped the whole tub -- shirts, water, vinegar and all right into the washer and proceeded to wash them in a regular wash cycle on HOT wash, COLD rinse.  The results:  the cotton/synthetic blends did not come totally clean, but the stains were more faint.  The 100% cotton shirt's armpits did come clean.  These were pit stains that had been there since last summer.  Really now, I need to work on pit stains sooner rather than later, but which stain remover works best?  Tonight I re-treated the shirts with recipe #2 below and I'd say that it cleaned the old sweat stains from my white shirts even more.  Yay!

Here are a few formulas to try on pit stains:

1.  Pour vinegar over pit stains, rub in course salt.  Put garment in the sun to dry.  Then wash as usual.  (Tip from Frugal Living using Vinegar as Stain Remover)

2.  Mix 1 part Dawn dish soap with 2 parts hydrogen peroxide.  Scrub with a brush, let sit for a few minutes and launder as usual.  (Tip:  Jillee added a little baking soda for more scrubbing power. ~ from One Good Thing Good Bye to Yellow Armpit Stains)

3.  Soap Jelly (I like the name of this):  Shave one bar of laundry soap (or bar soap like Ivory) into a quart jar.  Add boiling water to fill jar.  Stir or shake hard until soap is dissolved.  Allow to cool.  It should form into a jelly.  If too liquid, reheat and add a bit more soap.  If too stiff, add more hot water.  Apply to stains before washing. (from TipNut)

4. Laundry Pre-treat:  Mix 1 part dish washing soap (Dawn), 1 part ammonia, and 1 part water.  Add to spray bottle and spray on stains.  Use a brush to scrub it into tough stains.  Do NOT use this formula when using bleach.  Ammonia and bleach do not mix! (from Sunny Simple Life)

So far I have only tried just dish soap on stains and now recipe #2 for pit stains.  I have used bar soap for general stains on occasion too.  I want to make the soap jelly and try it, and the vinegar and salt  intrigues me.  Perhaps YOU have a tested, all-purpose laundry stain remover to share in the comments?  Please do!

 

(source)

Along with the arm pit stain solution, I found some other laundry solutions that you might be interested in.  When I was a girl at home, we always used Clorox bleach for whites.  Eventually the laundry was eaten away by the bleach and without fail someone's favorite colored T-shirt had bleach spilled on it.  Don't get me wrong, I still keep bleach in my laundry cupboard, but I rarely use it.  I do use it to scrub out the toilet bowl and we clean out water tanks at the corral with it too.  Occasionally I use bleach for really stinky, rank stuff, but most of the time, I prefer bleach alternatives like a good soaking in borax or washing soda before washing .  You can also improve your laundry with the most wonderful stuff -- baking soda!  Baking soda softens water and helps boost detergent.  Check out these links here and here for more bleach alternatives for your washing.  Of course, we know that sun bleaching is another great way to whiten whites.  Letting clothes dry in the sun for a day or two will help to bleach them naturally, and who can resist that "fresh air" smell?

Before we had Good Water here at the ranch, we had Horrid Alkali Water that had rust in it.  We couldn't drink it, but we did wash in it.  Not many people have rust in their water these days, but some of you who have wells in the country and don't have some sort of water system hooked up know what I'm talking about.  I hardly ever bought anything white because the only way things stayed white was if you didn't wash them or if you washed them in town.  After one washing in our horrid water, white clothing or towels turned creamy-white, then beige and continued to darken with every wash.  My mother-in-law helped me out with this problem and I figure I might as well share her trick with you if you just so happen to have rust in your water or if you get a rust stain on something.  We used a product called Rust-Away.  My local grocery store, which has a strong ranching customer base, sells it in the cleaning/laundry aisle.  I would put my white items in a dish pan or tub and get them wet, adding a small amount of water in the tub and then start working some of the Rust Away into the clothes, letting them soak until the rustiness lifted.  Then launder as usual.  Rust Away is rather nasty stuff and I think eventually it would eat away at your clothes, but it does work when you need it.

In my reading about alternatives to bleaching white clothing, I ran across the old idea of grass bleaching.  Have you ever heard of it?  I hadn't.  I have read many stories about pioneers drying their laundry on tall prairie grass because there were no clotheslines, but I didn't know that grass and sun combined can bleach fabrics. Wives' tale?  From the National Geographic website:  

To whiten fine linens and delicate heirloom quilts, try the traditional grass bleaching method that people used as late as the 1930s to bleach the print from flour sacks they planned to cut up for quilt blocks. Women spread the linens or quilt on a patch of grass in full sunlight, sometimes leaving them there for days until the fabrics reached a desirable degree of whiteness. The prevailing wisdom held that the sun and chemicals in the grass worked together to bleach the fabric.

 

Lastly, we come to the final touches part of laundry -- pressing --  which is much pleasanter to me now that I have my new, old-fashioned iron.  This one is a Black & Decker.  My mother-in-law, who loved to press clothes, had one very similar to this model.  It's heavy, it's got a slick, all-aluminum soleplate.  It does not have an irritating switch that turns it off every few minutes.  It doesn't look like a space-age iron nor does it have a modern, non-stick soleplate that is always gunked up.  With this classic, you can iron smoothly with or without steam, and that orange button there lets you mist as you iron if you want to.  Try as I might  to clean the soleplates of my non-stick irons, they would not come clean so ironing was not a smooth process and my clean clothes sometimes came off the ironing board with dark marks from the iron.  Those irons were light weight, yes, but it seemed I was always pressing down hard to iron out wrinkles.  Maybe I'm a bit quirky, but I like this simple, old-school iron.  Today a half dozen shirts were pressed proficiently, and I enjoyed it!

If you have any laundry tips to share, please do so in the comments.  Is Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle  in the reading audience?  Perhaps she'd like to share her laundress secrets!

Clothesline Season....

 (looks innocent enough, doesn't it?)

It's turning warmer now (86* today!) since I flipped the calendar page to June.  That means it's clothesline season once again and nearly all the family laundry goes to the clothesline for drying. I like fresh, line-dried clothes -- crisp, mostly unwrinkled, fresh-smelling, sun-kissed.  And the towels are crisp and rough which makes for a nice luffa-style rubdown out of the shower.  Some people like their towels soft, but I like mine best when they are line-dried and scratchy.  How do you take your towels?  (By the way, I want to try to grow some luffa this summer in the garden.)

Back when my mother-in-law, Hazel, lived next door, we shared our laundry tips and techniques with each other.  She told me that the best sort of day for line-drying was when a "friendly breeze" was blowing.  I knew exactly what she meant.  You want a breeze, but not a strong wind or a gale --just a light breeze that will gently waft the wet laundry, snapping out the wrinkles, making a relatively fast drying time, but not beating up the clothes.  The problem is when you live on the prairie, you most often get a harsh, whipping wind rather than a friendly breeze and so you must take what you get or only wash on "nice days."  The past few days we've had strong winds, to say the least, yet it hasn't stopped me from hanging out the clothes.  I do regret hanging out the sheets yesterday, but I did it anyway.  Here's the 27 second video to prove it.

Some people go to great lengths to get that fresh, outdoor-dried scent on their sheets and pillowcases, and I am one of them.  Do you hear the "ding donging" in the background?  That's my iron wind chime.  A takes a pretty stiff breeze to get it clanging.  The hardest part about drying the sheets yesterday was taking them off the line. 

One thing my mother-in-law taught me was to hang laundered jeans out on pants stretchers.  Have you ever seen these?  They are made of a light gauge metal that is in the shape of a pants leg -- wider at the top and narrowing toward the bottom.. They are expandable so you can stretch the denim out and get a perfect crease down the center of your jeans or trousers without ironing.  A crease is something lots of cowboys like.  I used them for many years and then my kids turned into teenagers and told me that they wanted no more of creases down the centers of their jeans and traded in their Wranglers for baggy jeans so that ended that chore.  Now the jeans hang free by their waistbands, legs flapping in the breeze.  No more stiff-legged jeans  fighting the wind.

When the kids were littles, I hung out all the diapers and plastic pants on the clothesline.  I think I washed diapers every other day, especially when we had two children in diapers at a time, which was every year except the year our firstborn was the only baby in the house and the year our 5th child was 2 or 3 years old.  We had a new baby every two years so I always had two children in diapers for about 10 years or so.  I really did like hanging out the diapers all in a row and letting the sun bleach them bright and white.  I suppose they were not as soft as diapers dried in the dryer, much like the luffa towels, but they did what they were designed to do.

Did you ever make tents underneath the clothesline?  We did, and so did our kids.  We hung blankets over the clothesline so that two or three of the wires were used.  That made the tent wide and it had a nice roof.  You had to use quite a few clothespins to keep the blankets from pulling and sliding.  Sometimes we took our naps under the clothesline tent and played house outdoors all afternoon.  We also made tents with blankets over the picnic table and camped out in the backyard in them at night, everybody snugly tucked into their sleeping bags with flashlights just in case we got scared and had to go into the house in the middle of the night.

Some of my favorite things about hanging out the clothes.....
The smell
The sound of birds singing
The sun
The friendly breezes
Seeing my daily work all in rows (there's a sense of seeing your accomplishments)
Carrying a baby in a basket of dry clothes
Saving money on electricity
Mostly no wrinkles
If I missed a stain, it's usually not set
It's fun to run through clothes or lay underneath the clothesline

What about you?  Any favorite clothesline memories to share?

The Right to Hang....

The Right to Hang out the laundry was on the front page of Yahoo News this morning,  and those that hang have got a lot of snooty city folks and housing development administrators' "panties in a wad" due to it's so-called unsightliness.  I'm a long-time clothesline hanger and have been practicing this method of drying since I was a kid at home.  Many "hangers" are finding great savings on their electricity bill and the pleasure that comes from the age-old task of pegging clothes outdoors and breathing in the fragrance of freshly laundered, sun-kissed, wind-whipped sheets, towels and T-shirts.  There's nothing in the world like lying down in your comfy bed with that scrumptious fresh air wafting about your head.

When all the buzz today is "green living" I can only imagine that the restrictions on clotheslines will soon be a thing of the past.  But it makes me wonder how they might try to regulate the method of hanging out?  Will underthings and nighties be restricted to the center lines while towels and sheets hide them between the front and back lines?  Will there be a fine issued when the neighbor's undies are blown off the line and into your shrubbery or when Spot the Dog pulls down the blue jeans from Mrs. Jones's line?  Perhaps they'll find a way to keep things more eye-appealing by requiring all hung towels to be earth tones to match the house paint or perhaps they'll  require sheets hung on Mondays and towels on Tuesdays and no hanging of underthings on the weekends when children are at home.  We surely want to keep clotheslines "G" rated.  Should there be a ban on hanging out when the wind speed is above 25 mph to avoid stray clothes coming of the line?  Surely hanging out will not be allowed to be a free expression of each family, will it?  How did they do it back in the Olden Days without ruffling the neighbors' feathers?  Or were feathers always ruffled no matter the hang out style?

Thank goodness I live in the country where I can hang out my laundry in total freedom, in any fashion and on any day I like.  My main concern about country hanging is dust and dirt, especially when my family members drive through the yard, kicking up gravel and dust which wafts over to the clothesline. Nothing makes me sizzle more than seeing the dirt fly when I've just hung out a load of wet wash on the line.  On warm fall days like today, I have to watch for wasps in the pant legs and arms of the clothes.  They tend to crawl in when the sun gets low and the air starts cooling so a good shake is in order when collecting the clothes from the line.  Other than that, my two neighbors don't mind a bit about my hanging, but I wonder if my style tells any secrets about me?  Enjoy the poem below which will give all you hangers something to think about next time you're pinning things to the clothesline.

The Clothesline

A clothesline was a news forecast
To neighbors passing by.
There were no secrets you could keep
When clothes were hung to dry.
It also was a friendly link
For neighbors always knew
If company had stopped on by
To spend a night or two.
For then you'd see the fancy sheets
and towels on the line;
You'd see the comp'ny tablecloths
With intricate design.
The line announced a baby's birth
To folks who lived inside
As brand new infant clothes were hung
So carefully with pride.
The ages of the children could
So readily be known
By watching how the sizes changed
You'd know how much they'd grown.
It also told when illness struck,
As extra sheets were hung;
Then nightclothes, and a bathrobe, too,
Haphazardly were strung.
It said, "Gone on vacation now"
When lines hung limp and bare.
It told "We're back!" when full lines sagged
With not an inch to spare.
New folks in town were scorned upon
If wash was dingy gray,
As neighbors raised their brows, and looked
Disgustedly away.
But clotheslines now are of the past
For dryers make work less.
Now what goes on inside a home
Is anybody's guess.
I really miss that way of life.
It was a friendly sign
When neighbors knew each other best
By what hung on the line!

~Marilyn Walker

Set free.....

I've set myself and my clothespins FREE!
For a year now, I have been using a clothespin bag that I lovingly made for myself and for a couple new brides. I thought then, "They're cute and they're useful," all the while knowing deep within my soul that MY new clothespin bag would put me in bondage.

"How?" you ask.

Well, let me begin at the beginning. I grew up with clothespins that had to be always returned to the clothespin bag after each wash day. They were always nice and smooth and tan (not tattered and gray and weathered). So I knew how the whole clothes line routine should go. But then I got married and my mother-in-love did not use a clothespin bag. Oh no. She left her pins on the line year round. How barbarian! But how liberating! I tried it, and I loved it. It was nice not always taking each and every pin off the line every time I hung out the laundry which was daily, especially when the children were small and there were seven of us to wash for. It was nice to hang the childrens' swimsuits right on the line after they ran through the sprinkler or hang the towel that dried the dog or to quick-dry the tea towels after doing dishes. No need to go find the bag of pins in the laundry room for little jobs like that.

Through the years, my clothespins have weathered gray and are a bit snaggly and some of them have a wee bit of lichen growing on them. But I love them and they just seemed far to wild and unrefined to be cloistered up into a bag for a year only come out for an airing once in awhile and only during daylight hours. These pins were used to bouncing on the line in all weathers -- sun, rain, hail, snow and wind and they had opportunity to be out in the late hours of the night under moonlight. How did I think I could ever get used to such regiment after all this freedom?

So for me and my clothespins, today was our Independence Day! Freedom to live on the edge of domesticity! The revolt was stoked by the large quantity of smelly barn-type laundry that required immediate attention. There were lots and lots jeans, t-shirts and socks which makes a great deal of pinning for the Laundress. And since there were so many loads, that meant when some things were dry, they needed to come off promptly and efficiently so as to make room for the next loads. Do you see how much pinning and unpinning and bagging this makes? Total fiddle-faddle in my lazy homemaker opinion.

So.........


The wild and gnarly clothespin

Today I have given up trying to be cute and fussy and proper about my clothesline and it's pins. It's back to the old ways. Ahhhh.....freedom.

Simple Joys....

Here's the 2 foot drift I've been walking through to the clothesline today. It's feeling very spring-like again and so far, we're up to 55 degrees and hoping for a little more warmth and sunshine in the days to come. ~happy squeal of delight~



My domestic little heart, aching for some clothesline refreshment, got its wish today. I love that feeling of a gentle breeze blowing, the sun shining and warming, the birds chirping, and the scent of the breeze wooshing through clean sheets and clothes. (snifffffff) Ahhhh! The few bugaboo's in snowish hanging of clothes is that I must be extra-careful not to drop them on the ground. I also must know the wind direction because this time of year, the barnyard has an extra pungent, wettish aroma that wafts over to the house with an easterly breeze. Thanks be to God, my first day of the Clothesline Season carries a fresh, clean westerly breeze to my clothesline!

Oh, and one more bit of excitement today......
I saw the First Robin of the year! ~happy squeal~ S. took a picture of him, but it was so far away that it wasn't worth posting, but I will be on the look-out for him again and will be carrying my pocket-camera with me. Simple Joys to be sure.