The Iron Lady

The Iron Lady

Let’s face it, who in their right mind likes to iron?  In a world where it is easier to take your clothes to the dry cleaners, why would anyone haunch over a board and iron their clothes?  Yet dry cleaners can charge a bomb to have your suits nicely starched and pressed and chemically wash your duvet.  Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers never had that luxury.   Back in their days the laundry was done on Mondays.  Women had to wash their clothes, not in washing machines, but in a tub using a wash board. The job of doing the laundry took several days.  First the clothes had to sit in a tub of soapy boiling or cold water.  Women used lye to dissolve grease and bleach clothes that were yellow stained.  Buckling (The act of soaking clothes in soap and lye) was done in a buckling tub.  Women used a clothes dolly to agitate the clothes inside the buckling tub.  This is what the drum in our modern washing machine does.  The drum spins the clothes.  As the clothes rub against each other with the aid of the drum, dirt and grime loosen and the alkaline in the detergent lifts the dirt.

Old-fashion stove top iron

  After the clothes were washed, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had to run each article of clothes through a mangle.  This got rid of the excess water.  The clothes were then hung on a clothes line or clothe horse.  On Thursdays the task of ironing was carried on.  Back in their day, irons had to be heated on coal stoves. 

  Electricity and electric irons hadn’t been invented.  The flat iron, first introduced in the middle ages, was forged out of iron.  Prior to its invention, people used pans with heated coals to iron out fabric.

Nowadays, with the invention of the washing machine, heated clothes rack and electric iron, the task of laundering has been made much easier.  The science of ironing is simple.  When the hot iron hits the fabric, it loosens the polymer fibres.  As the fibres cool the fibres keep its shape.  The weight of the iron helps to smooth the material out.  Would you wear a shirt that looks like it came out of a bottle?  I wouldn’t.   Ironing is a necessary task in the process of laundering.  I iron a little bit each day until all the week’s laundry has been done.  Here are a few tips to make ironing easier.

 

Ironing Tips

1.   Buy yourself a large, broad ironing board. Ironing boards come in all sizes.  They range from size A-E.  The broader the ironing board, the wider you can stretch your cloth against the ironing board cover, thus ironing the cloth in less time than you would using a smaller size ironing board.  Buy yourself a size E, which is 53 inches by 19 inches.

2.   Always, always fill your iron with filtered or spring water.  Never use water from the tap.  Tap water often leaves mineral deposits that can clog the iron and transfers lime scale onto your clean clothes.  Invest in a Brita filtered jug which filters the tap water. You can also boil a kettle of water and leave to cool. But for heaven’s sake...don’t use tap water to fill your iron. 

3.   Wrap your ironing board with aluminium foil.  Foil reflects heat.  You will cut the ironing time by half and iron on both sides of your cloth.  Line the ironing board with aluminium foil and then place the ironing board cover over this.

4.   Don’t iron just one garment at a time.  Why waste electricity, time and energy? Wait until you have a basket full of clothes to be ironed.  Iron once!  If the basket is overflowing, don’t panic.  Just iron a few articles of clothing at one time until the water in the iron runs out.  Unplug the iron. Take a break and then come back and iron the rest.

5.   Do your ironing in the bedroom.  I do this.  I position the ironing board between my side of the bed and the bureau and sit on the edge of the bed with Classic FM in the background.  I use the bed to sort the clothes to be ironed on one side of the bed and place the freshly ironed and neatly folded clothes in a neat pile on the other side.

6.   Begin ironing with the lowest temperature and iron those articles of clothes that need to be ironed on a lower temperature setting first.

7.   Reduce wrinkles by moving the freshly ironed areas away from you.

8.   Prevent marks on dark articles of clothing by ironing the material inside out.

9.   Shirts and other garments should never be ironed bone dry; they need to be moist before you start to iron them.

10.                Don’t have a sleeve board? No problem; simply place a couple of rolled up tea towels inside the sleeve and iron away.

11.                You can make your own starch by mixing 1 TBS of corn starch to 2 cups of water.  Place it in an empty spray bottle and you are good to go.  Starch settles in the bottom of the spray bottle, so shake the spray bottle each time you use it.  If the nozzle of the spray bottle clogs, simply insert a needle into the hole of the nozzle until it is clear.

12.                 When ironing a shirt, always hang it up straight after ironing.