Greatest Gizmo Ever!

    (This post was originally published in The Dancing Lamb Facebook page on September 27, 2020. It's such a great example of Victorian technology that it had to be included here as well.)

    I love hanging clothes on a clothesline. It's such an energy-efficient way of drying clothes, it's cheerful, and I think it makes the clothes easier to fold. I far prefer it to dragging clothes out of a dryer, dumping them in a heap into a basket and then hauling the whole thing upstairs to fold.

    We have a pretty nice set up at the moment - two heavy T posts set about 35 feet apart with a total of six heavy gauge wire lines strung between them. I've hung washing on them, but dragging the clothespin bag along and running back and forth to the basket or hauling it with me is tiresome. There had to be a better way. I found it, not surprisingly, in Amish country.

    Harvest and I went to Cashton, a large Amish area about 2 1/2 hours away, for a day trip earlier this summer (masked and socially-distanced). There is an Amish-owned clock repair shop there I had visited before with wonderful, hand-wound, new and restored antique clocks. I had been hankering after one of them for a good two years. In addition, there are things we use on a daily basis that Target doesn't have but the Amish do, and it's a truly beautiful area, so off we went.

    While we were driving on back roads past Amish farms, I noticed that a lot of families had laundry lines that were on pulleys.

I'd seen something like this in films set in New York City or Boston or wherever, strung between apartment buildings, but I'd never really thought about them. They were just set dressing to me, and I had no idea how they worked. As we pulled into the driveway of the farm where the clock shop was, the women of the household were hanging out laundry on one of these pulley systems. The laundry line stretched at least 60 feet in a gradual incline from the back of the house toward the top of an outbuilding nearby, crossing over the dirt driveway as it did so. It was a hot day, and the women stood in the relative shade of a small grassy area with trees at the back of house to hang the laundry out. One after another, pieces of clothing inched their way from the pulley at the bottom toward the pulley at the top. There was no running back and forth, no dragging of baskets. It was brilliant.

One of the clotheslines I saw that day stretches from the house to the top of a silo!

    After a little research, I decided to take down one of the wire lines on my clothesline and replace it with a pulley system as an experiment. This is the website where I found all the directions to set it up:

https://www.practicallyfunctional.com/diy-pulley-clothesline/

Clothesline spacers

Clothesline pulley with carabiner to attach it to T posts

    I don't know how I got along without one of these. It was a bit of faff and work to get it set up the first time because I didn't know what I was doing, but the second and third lines went up in a jiffy. The most frustrating part of the whole thing was threading the clothesline through the tightener. I found that wrapping the last four or five inches of the clothesline in heavy duty packing tape, extending that a few inches beyond the end of the line, and twisting it into a point makes it possible to do this with a minimum of swearing.     

The all-important line tightener. Pull the end of the line toward the knot to tighten the line.

    This is the best gizmo ever! Those Old Order Amish gals know a thing or two about laundry! You stand in one place with your clothespin bag hung on one of the carabiners or wherever you like with your basket at your feet, and you just run the line away from you putting clothes on the line as you go and using a spacer every 8 - 10 feet or so to keep the line from sagging too much. No more trudging up and down the line dragging the clothespin bag and a basket of wet laundry along. When the clothes are dry, you pull the line back toward you, take the clothes off, fold them, and put them in the basket right at your feet. If you're clever, you can sort your clothes as you hang them so pants are in one section, shirts in another, "unmentionables" in another, and so on. The photos below show just one line, but I liked it so much, I now have two more: one line for my clothes, one for Harvest's and one for household items like sheets and towels (very handy for hiding those "unmentionables" from view). 

     There is a bit of an art to using a system like this, as is the case with most domestic tasks that seem simple at first but actually require some thought. I started out with three line spacers for our 35-foot line and found that I needed more, so now I have enough for four per line. How far apart you need to place them depends on what you're hanging: lightweight clothes can have spacers farther apart because the line won't sag as much under the weight; jeans and heavy towels will need spacers closer together. The line sag is minimal if the pulley system is hung at an angle, but I don't have that kind of set up, so I do get a bit of sag, which is to be expected.  

    I'm not sure yet about hanging the clothes out this winter. I wondered how our local Amish families do it, and I saw that there were footprints in the snow back and forth where their laundry lines were, but I'm not sure if anyone uses a pulley system in our area: I've never seen one here. I don't know how long it would take to dry the clothes in our Wisconsin winter. Amish families hang their clothes out year round, but how do they get the clothes dry before they just freeze rather than drying? Apparently, freeze dried clothes are incredibly white and clean. And probably stiff. Very stiff.  Maybe it's best to use the lines in the basement.