Clothesline

by Khoke and Ida Livingston of Davis City, IA

One of my husband’s outstanding qualities is his impeccable memory when it comes to important things. Namely, our anniversary or my birthday. He never forgets and they never slip by. One year, near the end of winter as the approach of spring was on the horizon, he asked what I wanted for my birthday. He always makes me something handmade, so he needs a little time to prepare. He has made wooden spoons, tricolored cutting boards, cauldron paddles, a wooden butter churn, stone or mother-of-pearl jewelry; sometimes by request, sometimes by surprise. That year, however, I stepped outside of the usual range with the unromantically practical request of a new clothesline.

The Four-Poster

There are many different types of clothesline and over the years I have seen and used quite a few. I’ve used a t-frame clothesline; the single post at each end with the perpendicular 2×4 through which the lines are strung. Even braced, the arms on these often end up seesawing.

My father once made a homemade reel-type clothesline. It strung from the top of a slope near our house to the top of a tree. Since the tree was at the bottom of the slope, the line was nearly level, although the clothes at the far end were high above the ground. Being a resourceful man, the reels were made from a disassembled children’s bicycle. He took the wheels off along with the rubber tire. Dad made a wire attachment to secure the wheel, but it may have worked just as well if he had just used a torch to cut above the shafts holding the bicycle wheel and kept them with the wheel, using this frame to stabilize the wheel. From here he used high tensile wire to make the reel lines. This worked well, it gave the laundry lots of air to dry quickly. Unfortunately, all the driest laundry is at the far unreachable end, and the wettest laundry (the last to be hung), has to dry before the line can be reeled in.

In a pinch, I have also strung lines from tree to tree with baling twine as well. This works, sometimes too well, because then it is easy to not prioritize real lines. Thistle twine will only hold up for a few weeks at best, plastic twine can last for years – so use the thistle twine…

As we discussed our options, I told Khoke that I wanted the post and beam lines; a four-poster. This is two posts at each end that support a beam, through which the lines are strung. This type gives you several lines with a decent amount of space between them.

Khoke doesn’t like to do a job in halves and the inevitability of sagging lines was something he wanted to avoid. One day, as he observed electric fence tighteners, he realized he had found his clothes line solution. These ratchet tighteners could be incorporated to tighten the lines as they loosen from stretching.

Location, Location, Location

Naturally, we put the clothes line right beside our house, which sits on a small hill. This gives the drying laundry plenty of air. Unfortunately, sometimes too much air. We get so much wind here that our clothesline could have fared a little better in a slightly more sheltered location. As it stands, the ground beneath it is too often littered with clothespin skeletons from the wind wildly whipping the clothes and blowing them off the lines. The clothes pins made these days cannot hold up to that kind of abuse. I have to be careful how I pin up the clothes on windy days.

Family members of Khoke’s, whose names I have graciously forgotten, found themselves in the crosshairs of a location issue. Here, too, the husband rose to provide the requested necessary clothes line. He put in the posts and erected the clothesline early one summer under a shade tree in the backyard. His wife washed all the linens and stretched them on the newly constructed lines only to return later to find all the clothes and sheets streaked with purple from both fresh and digested mulberrys dropping from the tree above it. She proceeded to over-express her dismay, after which her husband took out his chainsaw and cut off the posts. One over-reaction generated another, which is unfortunate, as those mulberries were only going to be a problem for about 3 weeks.

Be aware/wary of erecting a clothesline in a former common walkway. Being “clotheslined” is the head-version of a tripwire. My family moved to Northwest Ohio when I was 9, and Dad rented a house in town while he built our house in the country. He got permission to construct a clothesline from the landlord while we were there. We found out later that the man who mowed all the neighborhood lawns got clotheslined on the new one Dad put up. It happened to be where he usually drove across; driving from one lawn customer to the next. He expressed his surprise with some extra-curricular vocabulary.

Building It

Khoke cut four rot-resistant hedge (Osage orange) posts for uprights. Then Khoke cut two 3in x 6in x 9 ft long beams for the cross pieces. The beams sat on notched posts and had nine holes drilled all the way through for the lines.

On each side, for every three holes in the beam, Khoke set three fence anchors on each side; a spiral rod screwed into the ground 3 ft deep with a metal loop at the top to connect the wire for bracing. Khoke bought nine fence tighteners; one for each line. For wire, he used barbless fencing wire as it is very strong. Regardless of that fact, the lines stretch over time and when they do, he ratchets the fence tightener to easily bring them back to crisp straight lines.

The fence tighteners only need to be on one side. Khoke fed the wire through the lines on one side and secured three lines to one fence anchor. Then he strung the wire across to the other beam and through the holes, cutting the wire about 30 in above the fence anchor. From here, he threaded the wire into the ratchet and tightened it just enough to hold. Khoke hooked a come-along to the ratchet spool and the fence anchor, tightening the wire. Then he threaded a new wire through the anchor up to the hole at the end of the ratchet, looping and wrapping it to secure it as tight as possible. Removing the come along, he ratcheted the tightener to pick up any slack that may have occurred.

When Khoke built our clothesline, he put the ratchet tighteners too close to the fence anchor. This makes it harder to ratchet them when he wants to tighten the lines. A neighbor had him build one for them patterned after ours, and this is where Khoke realized that placing those tighteners about 30 inches above the anchor makes using them much easier.

Using It

Having nine long lines, I thought I’d never be able to fill them all. There have been occasions, however, that I have. When I am washing and airing all the bedding, my gratitude for the abundance of line length is renewed.

Using a clothesline is pretty straightforward, but I do have a few tips for anyone using one. Ideally, hang any heavier items near to the ends and lighter items in the middle. This reduces line stretching. To fluff towels, shake them a little and give them a good snap or two before hanging them (this gets wrinkles out of cotton or linen fabric as well). They are often best hung from the short end. My lines, however, have so much wind that I fold my towels in half over the line to help keep them from blowing off. Lightweight knit shirts are draped in half over the line as well so they don’t stretch out, but most other shirts I hang from the bottom so they don’t show clothes pin marks at the shoulder once dry.

Bright sunlight can fade clothing left on the line too long. I will turn clothes inside out before hanging them up if I particularly wish to delay their natural fading. On the other hand, I often put my whites on the first row that gets the most sun. The sun will lighten and brighten whites and can help bleach out stains.

Many people have some emergency wet weather lines on their porch. This is a feature missing from ours. I am as short as Khoke is tall, and any line on our porch that I could reach would definitely clothesline him.

I have done laundry on rainy days and hung the clothes on my clotheslines anyway. The extra rinse doesn’t hurt anything, and often I am too busy to be impatient with the clothesline. If I need a few articles of clothing to be dry sooner than later I will hang them around my indoor wood cook stove. I have a wooden drying rack that is raised on occasion, and I have dried socks in my oven with the oven door open propped slightly ajar.

If I need a newly washed article to be dry right away, I will lay it out on a dry towel and lay the article, say, a shirt, on the towel. Then I’ll roll up the towel with the shirt in it and ring the rolled towel very tightly, repeating this a couple times. Now I unroll the towel, remove the much drier shirt and iron it the rest of the way dry. You can make a wet shirt into a dry shirt in just a few minutes this way.

There are those who think that you can’t use a clothesline in cold weather. You absolutely can! Many times I have hung laundry that froze stiff as a board before I had it fully pinned. Dry winter air will pull the moisture out of laundry too, though not as quickly as a sunny summer day. The last to dry is where the clothespin folded the corners of laundry over the line. Sometimes I have to pry the pin off and manually unfold the shirt corner from the line. This little bit of frozen fabric will be slightly damp when it thaws in the house but it is not a problem.

Traditions

Regardless of the type of clothesline one has, they are practical on any small farm. Our clothes work as hard as we do and rotate regularly through the laundry basket. Clotheslines offer an inexpensive, traditional, and ecofriendly way to provide a necessary, and often wrinkle-free solution to drying our laundered clothes. The clothesline served my mother and grandmothers well, and I find no need to change or fix what isn’t broken.