(thanks to the lovely and wonderful Lord Eoin for today’s inspiration)
Here are some lovely re-enactors playing with laundry. (we are so nuts. who else would do laundry by hand, probably scrupulously taking notes somewhere behind that gorgeous washtub, and call it "play"? Go see the rest of KirrilyRobert’s pics.)
Do you think those shifts that are being worn are cotton? The green dress
looks like linen – I find it very funny how I’m learning to tell at a
GLANCE which is what.
I’ve been looking forward to hanging my laundry outside again – the
machines are in the house, and in winter I shamelessly use the dryer
since I’m catching the heat inside. Now that it’s getting too warm for
that, it’s been raining. So no point.
Though if I had my dogtrot addition built, I could hang laundry in the dogtrot room.
Daan kindly bought the house a couple of cotton waffleweave towels when
he put in this summer’s Towel Order for his swim team. I’d been
regretting not buying some ever since I got back from Italy.
Florence has a climate that’s very like the Florida Panhandle – intense
sunlight, hazy humidity, hot days, warm nights. But we could take our daily showers (the Italian albergo management
thought we Americans were nutty clean freaks) and hang up the thin
waffleweave or flat towels in the room and they’d dry. I know from
experience that terry towels are not so clever.
It is difficult to tell whether the shifts are cotton or linen. I was looking at the wrinkles on the sleeves in both this picture and the ones on Flickr, and sometimes they look cotton and sometimes they look linen. I’m so used that WHITE white being cotton, but I suppose that drying in the sun could bleach linen that white.
The wrinkling pattern looks like linen. The green outer dress also looks like linen to me.
Linen was prized because it could be bleached white. Sometimes it would be soaked in buttermilk (the thin acidic stuff leftover from churning milk, not the cultured stuff we get now) and then laid in the sun.
That said, I think that anyone not up upper class would probably have a more beige, unbleached shift. Although after a lot of washing and drying it would get whiter.