“A good maid will manage her work in so methodical a manner, that she will never either feel or appear to be hurried.”
Taken from an 1829 book; Domestic Duties, Or, Instructions to Young Married Ladies, on the Management of Their Households by Mrs William Parkes.
Following the U.S. recall of the washing machine models WPGT9350, WPGT9360 and WPGT9150 in September by the manufacturing company GE Appliances, who received 71 reports of internal washer components burning or catching fire, we got to wondering; just how common are washing machine fires?
If you asked most people which household appliance is the greatest fire hazard, there probably aren’t many who’d reply “washing machine”. More likely candidates have surely to be the cooker, the microwave, or, the one we’re most often warned about, the electric blanket. But it would seem that it is actually your washing machine which is most likely to catch fire.
Read More »There are Guinness World Records for almost anything nowadays. A few of the strangest we’ve come across are; most apples held in own mouth and cut by a chainsaw in one minute, largest hairy family, and longest metal coil passed through the nose and out of the mouth. We kid you not. So we had a look to see what kind of laundry-related world records there might be…
We use phrases and sayings every day to express ourselves. There are so many of them and they’re so embedded in our language that quite a lot of the time we don’t even realise that we’re doing it. If something is below the belt it’s not very fair, and that phrase’s origin comes from boxing and means not very fair because punching below the waist was seen as cheating. Ditto a low-blow. Some things produce more phrases than others; lots of phrase origins are rooted in the weather for example. The laundry room is another place that has certainly given rise to a fair few phrases.
As much as we keep our fingers crossed that they’ll go on forever and never break, our washing machines will, one day, no longer be a repair case and we will have to admit that they’ve washed their last.
We love denim. It can be practically anything; smart or casual, faded or indigo, skinny jeans or high-waisted bootcuts, handbags or biker jackets. Denim is the fabric that does it all. But we haven’t always had denim to rely on.
Silk has quite a few downsides. To name only two it’s expensive and hard to wash. But we forgive it because it’s just so beautiful and soft. Silk is an interesting fabric in quite a few ways, and it’s also one of the oldest fabrics that we have.
Over the years, clothing has changed significantly, and none so more than for baby boys and girls. It’s fairly commonplace nowadays that a boy’s nursery should be blue, and a girl’s should be pink. However, it wasn’t always like this.
Imagine a world without any colour, or more specifically, any coloured clothing. No black dresses. No green hats or red shirts. No colour at all. It’s hard to imagine a wardrobe without a multitude of hues and shades. Luckily, this was a reality even our great great great ancestors didn’t have to face. The first recorded mention of fabric dyeing dates all the way back to 2600 BC. Originally, dyes were made with natural pigments mixed with water and oil used to decorate skin, jewelry and clothing. Back then, natural dyes were used on caves in places such as Spain.
We accept that the colour of clothing can change over time. What started out as a black top, no matter how careful we may be, will be a little less black and a bit more like dark grey after a few years of wear. But even so, it’s quite extreme to go from green to red, which is what Father Christmas did. He may be a jolly man in a red suit with white fur now, but when he first appeared on the scene he was actually a vision in green.
