For a spring refresher, have a look at my line-drying tutorial, “Laundry Secrets From our Grandmothers,” and  enjoy this lovely rite of the season.

Last summer the three of us traveled in Kenya and Tanzania for two months.  Our first stop was a volunteer stint at Colobus Trust on the coast of Kenya, where we worked on Colobus monkey conservation, and lodged in the organization’s simple rooms.  Our packs were light, with few extra clothes, and it was the cusp of the rainy season. When our freshly washed clothes were hung in the open-air windows, they sometimes took days to dry, even though they were under cover–the air was so thick and moist.  Midway into our week there, I’d been wearing my only dry shirt for a few days, and was starting to feel quite funky.  “Do you think they’ll ever dry?”  I lightly asked one of the staff, who lives in a village nearby.  “Oh sure,” he told me, “when the sun comes out, they’ll dry right away.”  “Well, you know how impatient we Americans are,” I joked, “used to just popping things in the dryer!”  “The what?”  “Um, the clothes dryer,” I said meekly, suddenly remembering that I was speaking to a man who’d lived his whole life with several other family members in a one-room house the size of my daughter’s bedroom, made of simple earthen materials, and without power.

Many of the people we talked to in the villages of Kenya and Tanzania know that Americans’ houses are too big, and that we own cars, but the thought of clothes dryers was inconceivable.  Using an expensive machine to do something that the air does naturally came across as profligate, idiotic, and I suppose even indecent.  At the Colobus Trust, my Kenyan friend started to laugh, and I was about to laugh along, when I realized that this was a private laugh, tinged with bitterness–a laughter I was not invited to join.  I resolved in that moment  to sever my dryer dependency.

We’d had an outdoor clothesline for some time, but in rainy Seattle outdoor clothes-drying is a part time proposition in any season.   So when we got home from Africa, we rigged up a retractable line that stretches across the length of our long basement, over the empty guinea pig cage (Nicholas and Clover, RIP), past the camping gear, and finally making a nice little curtain for Tom’s corner bike workshop.  It works great, and now we can line-dry our laundry no matter what the weather is doing.  The clothes dry in about half a day, and we almost never use our dryer anymore.  If you need your line-dryed items de-wrinkled or softened, you can pop them in the dryer for a couple of minutes before you fold them (really–two minutes is enough!).

We now realize that since our basement ceiling is quite high, we don’t really need the retractable line–we never take it down, so we could have just strung a rope across the room.  But for a basement with a lower ceiling, the retractable line would be nice.  In any case, we recommend using coated clothesline line, even though it’s more expensive than cotton or nylon, as the latter quickly slackens.

Our friend MegaFlava is more of a tinkerer, Make-zine type.  His basement isn’t long enough for a line such as ours, so he rigged up this amazing rack on a frame made of bent electrical conduit, and criss-crossed with clothesline.

It lowers and raises on a pulley system, so after you hang the clothes, you can pull it up to the ceiling and still use the room.  Wet clothes are heavy, and MegaFlava had to work on balancing the pulleys so that the full clothesline could be hoisted without too much exertion.

Of course, hanging laundry on the subterranean line isn’t as delightful as time spent hanging clothes outside on a sunny day, but it is still meditative, and I find it pleasant.  Occasionally I do a simple multi-task–my two faves:  singing, or practicing recorded French lessons with headphones (yes, a clothesline Luddite with an iPod).

My dad grew up in Iowa, dryer-less of course.  He tells me about how his mother would bring the clothes in from the winter line, the shirts frozen solid as a board.  I like to  think of her, My Grandma Carrie, as I hang my family’s clothes in our warm basement.

For more, have a look at Laundry Outlaws, and my clothes-hanging tutorial.

(As always, thanks to my sweet hubby for the beautiful photos!  See more at his Flickr site.)

• Hang shirts, dresses, nightgowns, or anything else with sleeves from the bottom, not the shoulders (or they’ll look like they have 80s shoulder-pads).
• Light sleeveless tanks and camis may hold their shape better if hung from the shoulders; just clip the very tops without folding over.
• Hang trousers from the waistband.  If they are too long or heavy, you can clip the cuffs up onto the line just outside of the waist
• For delicate cotton sweaters or other tops that you don’t want to clip, thread pantyhose through the armholes and pin those to the line.
• 

  Wet towels are heavy; folding them over helps keep their shape.

  Hang towels from the short end, folded over about three inches.  Give them a sharp snap in each direction before hanging, and again when taking them down to make them a little softer.  (Why does this work? Any physics teachers out there?)  Adding a quarter cup of white vinegar or baking soda to your wash cycle will also help soften towels.

• Fold sheets in half, then pin the corners of the hemmed, open end to the line.  Pin opposite sides of the hem in different places so air can flow through the middle.
  

  Sheets like so...

• Our grandmothers learned to hang socks from the toes, but I can’t see that it makes a difference.  It does help drying time to clip socks and skivvies to the line, though, rather than just draping them over (which is tempting–it’s faster).  If you drape them, the middles take longer to dry, and they often blow off.   I like to shake the smalls to the bottom of the basket, then hang them all together.  Socks can be hung in pairs–it’s pretty easy to find them in the basket as you go.  Then you can just fold them as you take them down, and save sorting time.
• You may want to hang colored-things wrong side out, and out of direct sunlight.  Most things are fine for a few hours, but whole days of bright sun can cause fading over time.

Any other line-drying tips?  Please share!

A favorite spring ritual: switching the flannel sheets and down comforters for the light, sun-dried cotton sheets and blankets.

If you don’t already have a clothesline, putting one up would be a lovely way to celebrate the spring season.   If you’re in a DIY mode, click here for a simple line you can put up with un-electrified hand tools and take down when not in use, requiring just two eye rings and a sailor’s cleat.  Be sure to use coated rope made for clotheslines, as plain cotton or nylon quickly stretches out, and eventually mildews.  Because of our deck configuration, our line is really too low, but it still works just fine.  The ideal clothesline height is as high as you can comfortably reach–remember the wet laundry will drag it down a fair bit.  6 or 7 feet is typical.

Small spaces can inspire creativity in clothesline tactics:  retractable/removable lines don’t require a straight shot across a long yard–they can be zigzagged between trees, fence posts, whatever you have. For large loads or sheets, we commandeer extra space by hanging laundry from deck railings, chairs, and over tree branches.

If you’re interested in constructing a permanent line, there is plenty of inspiration/how-to in this new Mother Earth News article.

Does your Home Owner’s Association or local government prohibit clotheslines where you live?    Then we want to encourage gentle nonviolent resistance (see my recent post on Laundry Outlaws).  Consider hanging your clothes in spite of the ban (in as nice a way as you can), educate your neighbors (sweetly), and register your HOA in the Right to Dry registry.  Find more information there on beginning a neighborhood campaign to overturn the ban.  Remember the steps of non-violent action attributed to Gandhi:  First they’ll ignore you, then they’ll laugh at you, then they’ll fight you, then you’ll win. (If all goes well, we’ll skip the fighting part.)

Together we can re-create the standards of beauty that define our neighborhoods.  Using the earth’s natural cycles of sun and air to refresh the clothes we and our children wear every day, and the cloth beneath which we sleep–how beautiful is that?

I’ve loved hearing all of your laundry stories!  If you have a creative clothesline idea, please share…

Well, they ARE a bit shocking. I am sure my mother would want me to point out that these are my pretties, not hers.

People all over the country are  agitating to overturn clothesline bans.  Meanwhile, when clotheslines are outlawed, only outlaws have clotheslines. My renegade little mom went ahead and strung herself a retractable line across the back deck, and now her scivvies dry happily, waving in the breeze as is only proper.  If you live under one of these ridiculous bans, we hope you’ll become a laundry outlaw too.  If the Clothesline Police arrest you, we’ll hold a bake sale, raise funds, and bail you out.  Promise.

For the rest of us, one of the best things we can do in support of the Laundry Outlaws is to hang clothes out ourselves, cheer for one another’s efforts, and make line drying so NORMAL that the bans will seem as ludicrous as they are. Are your neighbors shocked by the glaring presence of your oversized underthings?  Be nice about it.  Right though you may be, see if you can hang your necessaries a little out of their line of sight.  As Benjamin Franklin put it (he was talking about laundry, wasn’t he?):  “We must all hang together, or assuredly, we will all hang separately.”

For more information, and to take further action, join the good folks at Project Laundry List in the Right to Dry campaign.

For more on line-drying, see my previous post on subterranean clotheslines, and also this peek at the beautiful art in my new book.

This is the first in a short series on laundry.  Next: simple outdoor lines (suitable for those, like me, with an irrational fear of power tools).

This is the season that everyone starts calling to ask why crows are dive-bombing their heads.  They are, of course, protecting their nests, eggs, and soon their fledglings.  It’s a seasonal behavior, and will cease as the chicks grow into sturdy young adults.  Dive-bombing makes crows seem aggressive, or even “mean.”  I’m not a crow apologist, but I do think we need to remember that because they are so large, and they have such big nests, crows don’t have the advantage of quiet, hidden chick-rearing that many birds do.  They resort to cawing and swooping only in order to protect their young.  If you are scolded by a crow this time of year, just try to avoid it–cross the street, and act uninterested.

All the beautiful Crow Planet prints are available for sale.  Contact artist Dan Cautrell through his Fusion Press Studio website.

Last summer the three of us traveled in Kenya and Tanzania for two months.  Our first stop was a volunteer stint at Colobus Trust on the coast of Kenya, where we worked on Colobus monkey conservation, and lodged in the organization’s simple rooms.  Our packs were light, with few extra clothes, and it was the cusp of the rainy season. When our freshly washed clothes were hung in the open-air windows, they sometimes took days to dry, even though they were under cover–the air was so thick and moist.  Midway into our week there, I’d been wearing my only dry shirt for a few days, and was starting to feel quite funky.  “Do you think they’ll ever dry?”  I lightly asked one of the staff, who lives in a village nearby.  “Oh sure,” he told me, “when the sun comes out, they’ll dry right away.”  “Well, you know how impatient we Americans are,” I joked, “used to just popping things in the dryer!”  “The what?”  “Um, the clothes dryer,” I said meekly, suddenly remembering that I was speaking to a man who’d lived his whole life with several other family members in a one-room house the size of my daughter’s bedroom, made of simple earthen materials, and without power.

Many of the people we talked to in the villages of Kenya and Tanzania know that Americans’ houses are too big, and that we own cars, but the thought of clothes dryers was inconceivable.  Using an expensive machine to do something that the air does naturally came across as profligate, idiotic, and I suppose even indecent.  At the Colobus Trust, my Kenyan friend started to laugh, and I was about to laugh along, when I realized that this was a private laugh, tinged with bitterness–a laughter I was not invited to join.  I resolved in that moment  to sever my dryer dependency.

We’d had an outdoor clothesline for some time, but in rainy Seattle outdoor clothes-drying is a part time proposition in any season.   So when we got home from Africa, we rigged up a retractable line that stretches across the length of our long basement, over the empty guinea pig cage (Nicholas and Clover, RIP), past the camping gear, and finally making a nice little curtain for Tom’s corner bike workshop.  It works great, and now we can line-dry our laundry no matter what the weather is doing.  The clothes dry in about half a day, and we almost never use our dryer anymore.  If you need your line-dryed items de-wrinkled or softened, you can pop them in the dryer for a couple of minutes before you fold them (really–two minutes is enough!).

We now realize that since our basement ceiling is quite high, we don’t really need the retractable line–we never take it down, so we could have just strung a rope across the room.  But for a basement with a lower ceiling, the retractable line would be nice.  In any case, we recommend using coated clothesline line, even though it’s more expensive than cotton or nylon, as the latter quickly slackens.

Our friend MegaFlava is more of a tinkerer, Make-zine type.  His basement isn’t long enough for a line such as ours, so he rigged up this amazing rack on a frame made of bent electrical conduit, and criss-crossed with clothesline.

It lowers and raises on a pulley system, so after you hang the clothes, you can pull it up to the ceiling and still use the room.  Wet clothes are heavy, and MegaFlava had to work on balancing the pulleys so that the full clothesline could be hoisted without too much exertion.

Of course, hanging laundry on the subterranean line isn’t as delightful as time spent hanging clothes outside on a sunny day, but it is still meditative, and I find it pleasant.  Occasionally I do a simple multi-task–my two faves:  singing, or practicing recorded French lessons with headphones (yes, a clothesline Luddite with an iPod).

My dad grew up in Iowa, dryer-less of course.  He tells me about how his mother would bring the clothes in from the winter line, the shirts frozen solid as a board.  I like to  think of her, My Grandma Carrie, as I hang my family’s clothes in our warm basement.

(As always, thanks to my sweet hubby for the beautiful photos!  See more at his Flickr site.)