There are things in life that only your mother will tell you. For example, the Scarsdale diet is easy to stick to. My mother reminded me often, without being asked, that leather should not be worn by anyone over 35. She never visited me without throwing in a load of laundry (“Why do you let it pile up?), or cooking a “nice meal” for the photo guy-as if I was starving him. She hated that I couldn’t sew, and rarely missed the chance to ask me: ‘What’s going on with the hair?”
My mother was the sort of person those who didn’t fear her, might call “some piece of work.” Straightforward, and highly opinionated, to me, her greatest asset was her fearlessness. She was afraid of nothing, and everyone, especially me, adored her.
Growing up in the deep shadows of a fearless know-it-all, I learned many things, but little of what my mother impressed upon me to learn has stuck with me as vividly, as how to do the laundry. In order to perform her laundry doing miracles, she required safety bleach, bluing, brown soap, white vinegar, hydrogen peroxide and a wash line. I can tell you how to launder anything. And thanks to my mother, the events that take place in my laundry room, under the watchful eye of her photograph, are 3 parts chem lab, 1 part old fashioned laundry doing genius.
So for all of you today, I’ll share my mother’s words of wisdom on how to launder very old, very precious and irreplaceable vintage draperies:
“No. No. Never. I wouldn’t take the chance. Hang them on the line in the rain, and freshen them up with linen water, and leave them to air out for a few days.
Give them a good starching, and hang them right back up.”
She wouldn’t take the chance…? I’m still not convinced a hand washing wouldn’t work. I fill the sink with distilled water,(or yes, that’s on the list of stuff we must have on hand too), and add the borax, swoosh it around. Then I empty the sink. She’s in there, the laundry diva-shouting her laundry doing procedures to me from the nether world.
She was never wrong about the laundry, or anything else for that matter. Except perhaps the leather thing.
xxlu
