At 09:05 PM 11/26/04 -0500, Tamara P. Duvall wrote: > . . . how do you sprinkle the > fabrics (linen and cotton) which require steam?
Mom used a sprinkler bottle -- you could buy a sprinkler top that fitted into a pop bottle like a cork. She rolled the items up and put them into an oilcloth-lined bushel basket afterward, covered with a damp towel until morning. I recall that you got the best spray by shaking the bottle in such fashion that the water dashed from the bottom of the bottle to crash against the cork. I.e., you would accelerate the bottle toward the clothes, then jerk it back. I use a spray bottle, and usually iron soon after misting, since I seldom have more than two or three garments that need to be ironed. The "plant misters" from Walmart clog when used for starch, and are hard to adjust. I keep diluted starch in a marked-for-mixing spray bottle from the hardware store, and water in an "oil-o pump" (all lower case in the brand name) pressure bottle I got from a discount expensive-kitchenware store. It was meant to allow you to use fats sparingly -- mist your rolls with olive oil before baking instead of brushing them with butter, for example -- but it clogged up on the oils I wanted to spray, so I cleaned it out and sent it to the laundry, where it works very well. I think it *would* have worked if I'd put a little grain alcohol in the oil, but I didn't know at the time that you could buy plain, unflavored alcohol. I was tickled, during our Black Friday tour of Target (a chain store), to see a cloth-lined laundry basket. On closer inspection, it turned out to be plain twill -- no point whatsoever to it, except to make the laundry basket look "country". And, perhaps, it was a low-quality basket that would have snagged the clothes otherwise. And I suspect that the brown color of the wicker was dye; probably *was* a good idea to line *that* basket. (I use a Rubbermaid basket. And put ironing in a plastic bag on the rare occasions that I want to give it time to even out.) -- Joy Beeson http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ http://home.earthlink.net/~dbeeson594/ROUGHSEW/ROUGH.HTM west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where it's nasty out. (But we had pleasant weather for Thanksgiving and Black Friday.) To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
