Making 300 Year Old SLIME for ✨Laundry✨ Day

Save 20% on your first Native purchase! Click here bit.ly/nativeabbycox8 and use my code ABBYCOX8 #AD Modern dress is from Voriagh! www.voriagh.com/ & all historical pieces were handsewn by me 😀

I appreciate that slippers were worn by laundresses because of wet feet problems, so Crocs are weirdly more accurate than expected!

The 'i'm learning serviceable skills in case of an apocalypse' 'im just trying to make my lunch' is an absolute mood. The amount of times I've taken over the kitchen/living room/entire house with a project on the go with and my husband walks in, notices the happy little crafting dragon in her messy little cave and just backs away slowly.

Don’t forget that saturating fabric with starch and ironing it, helps keep stains and soil from setting into the fabric permanently.

With the iron, I would treat it the way we treat marcel irons in hair. Once you remove from the oven, test it on a piece of tissue paper or a perm paper to make sure it’s not too hot. If it singes the paper it’s too hot for delicate fabrics.

My mother (back in the ‘50s) would always do one load in the washing machine of things that got starched; she boiled up Argo laundry starch (corn) on the stove until it thickened, then gradually added more water while beating, so no lumps. She would then add that to the last rinse in the washing machine, and then dry as usual. After that, the articles (I recall pillowcases and my father’s shirts in particular) would be sprinkled and folded, and placed in a heavy duty plastic bag for at least an hour while the water distributed evenly throughout. Then it was my job to iron them. Back then, I hated it; now, surprisingly I find ironing soothing.

Abby: I am learning a skill incase of the apocalypse. Me: So does this mean ruffs will come back into fashion if modern civilization falls? Because now I am imagining Mad Max Fury Road with ruffs.

I think the Crocs make the outfit.

Love the shenanigans you get up to for the sake of recreating history. Between you and Bernadette Banner I'm not only thoroughly educated but have laughed myself silly from your side commentary. Thank you for continuing to put yourself in harm's way fir science and education. Plus you aren't the only one to nearly set you house on fire. I've nearly set my house on fire by turning on the wrong burner on my stove.

My inner 90s kid looked at the amount of work put into goffering and went "I wonder if you could use a hair crimper to do that faster?" LOL

I think the history of laundry is fascinating and doesn't get focused on enough. Like, the popularity of laundry starch, fabric softener, and ironing has been declining for awhile, because fashion trends have moved away from requiring those practices. Then synthetic fabric became so popular cause it was "wrinkle free", but that came with the unintended consequence of micro-plastics from these materials. Washing machines and dryers are convenient, but use a lot of electricity and water, so some people are moving back to hand washing and clothes lines.

One additional point to consider: the powdered bluing ingredients would probably leave you with a dryer starch mixture. The texture might be less gross.

My mom was a nurse( old school since I am at elderly age ATM) and she would starch her caps. When I was older I would help....Argo starch, I would help rub it in and wipe it off much like you did so the starch was in the fiber. Ironing was her job until I was a teen. One day we washed the front of the fridge very well and plastered those caps to the front and let the hot weather dry them. Some of her colleagues had ruffled caps and used an iron like yours but shorter to make the ruffles. She had the best caps crisp, stiff & white. She looked like the classic nurse...Dad's shirts went to the laundry and came back perfect. I find ironing and starching relaxing and now have no real need to do either. Good work Abby, mistress will not fire you yet. My grandmother used a sugar mixture boiled and dipped things that needed to be crisp in that.....that she brought over from the old country.

Neighbours upon seeing Abby in the yard in an 18th C dress and bonnet: "Honey! She's doing something for the internet again 🤷‍♀"

At some point egg whites were used for this purpose too, right? I don’t know if that’s specific to the Iberian Peninsula, but what I’ve always heard here in Brazil is that the nuns would clean and stiffen the white part of their habits using egg whites, which meant there was an abundance of leftover yolk, hence the use of yolk in so many Portuguese desserts And great video! Learnt a lot

Your shocked expression and $3500 for a f'n headset...oh that's so me and my husband! The amount of time and labor needed for laundry up until the early 20th century makes me so glad that I have wash and wear, baby.

Okay, yeah, it was a hassle and a half, but you gotta admit that that cap does look fantastic afterward

watch out, if the wind turns west at more than 3km/h on a full moon the third friday of the month in the summer, it'll turn yellow

Abby, I seem to recall someone saying (maybe Townsend’s channel, the episode when they interviewed the living history laundress??) that starching actually helped keep white clothes white because soil wouldn’t soak into the cloth fibers because the starch was already there. Water would lift the soil off before soaking into the cloth and releasing the starch for restarching.

So your comment about not getting to hung up on the correlation of white clothing against the skin and social standing jogged my memory—in certain regions of Germany, it was a THING for the farmers (the average, ordinary, working hard to feed themselves farmers) to have a perfectly clean, starched white shirt for Sundays or social occasions, always. So yeah, not necessarily only for the upper classes, but definitely something that carried a message.