Ironing

Neither do I Goose , I don't buy anything which will take longer washing, ironing, and generally faffing over than the time that I will be wearing it.

If you dry clothes in the breeze outside, or laid flat over a clothes horse, and fold them as soon as you take them in they do not need ironing. It is when they are bunched up to dry that the creases appear. I have a clothes horse with only one tier of parallel wires, and "wings" that open out with more parallel wires, so everything can be hanging free and separately. there is a second one in reserve for big washes.

On the patio or in front of a sunny window, things dry fast because air can circulate between them. If the weather is really awful and I don't want damp clothes indoors, then the tumble dryer comes into use, but only then.

Lully It is amazing how much they can learn to do when they have to. My girls were about 13 and 15 when I rebelled. I had been washing their clothes and returning them to their rooms neatly folded (I drew the line at putting them away)

Then one day I recognised a lot of the clothes in the laundry baskety as ones I had taken upstairs clean for them the day before. How the heck had they got them dirty that soon?

Answer - they tried on a dozen things before they were happy with what they wore, and threw the rejects on the floor. Then they were yelled at to tidy up, so they scooped them all up again and threw them into the laundry basket.

I gave them a short lesson in how to separate the things for a hot wash from the things for a warm short one, showed them how to put in detergent, choose a program and turn on the washing machine, and told them they were now responsible for having clean clothes to put on. From then on, they coped fine, and when their brother was a few years older, they insisted that he washed his own too.

The only minus point to this was that the washing machine was in the cellar, where there was no natural light, so they would switch on the light and leave it on until they remembered to get their clothes out of the machine - which could be days later. Between that and the machine being used for a few items when they ran short of clothes ( x 3), the bills soared.

I don`t iron bras, or socks, but all other clothing gets ironed, apart from pleated skirts of course. I definitely iron teatowels, I like to get clean ones out looking nice and smooth, not creased up, but I don`t iron towels. My sister-in-law ironed everything, even nappies!

Agree with you Elegran I had to do my own washing and ironing as soon as I was secondary school age, if I had no clean socks to wear then I only had myself to blame.