History of domestic objects and housekeeping: list of articles

Washing the laundry

• History of laundry - overview up to c1800
• History of laundry part 2 - washing clothes and linen - overview from about c1800
• Washboards - their "invention" and history
• Great washes and washing-days
• Washing bats and beetles - beating the washing clean
• Washing dollies and possers - for use in a tub
• Lye and chamber lye - washing with ashes or urine, bucking
• Lye and ashes - process illustrated
• French washboards
• Washing boards in Italy
• Laundry ponches, punches, possers
• Early washing machines
• Washing and cleaning for a duke in 17th century England
• Laundresses
• Bag wash and wet wash
• Laundry in ice-holes in frozen rivers
• Laundry punches, ponches, possers

Starching, bluing, and drying laundry

• Laundry blue
• Starching laundry - from late medieval times
• Clothes horses and airers
• Drying outdoors
• Starching muslin - methods from 18th and 19th centuries
• Where to buy laundry blue

Ironing the laundry

• History of ironing - including linen smoothers, mangle boards, box irons etc.
• Early electric irons
• Gas irons
• Ironing boards
• Ironing sticks and clubs in Korea and Japan
• Irons for frills & ruffles
• Linen press, napkin press, clothes press
• Mangle boards and rollers
• Mangles - box mangles especially

• Charcoal iron designs - birds - and a steam locomotive flat iron
• Dalli irons - and fuel briquettes

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Kitchen, dairy & pottery

• Bakehouses and communal bread ovens
• Bakers' peels - for bread ovens
• Bannocks,baking over an open fire
• Beer warmers and ale mullers
• Butter crocks and coolers
• Butter-making - churns
• Cooking without fire using lime
• End-over-end barrel churns
• Game pie dishes in 19th century England
• History of pressure cookers
• Hasteners and meat screens
• Nutcrackers
• Redware and red clay in the USA
• Roasting jacks - string, bottle jack, dangle spit
• Sugar nippers, cutting sugar-loaf
• Tureens, ducks, hens

• Kitchen antiques - resources
• Domestic pottery - resources
• Salt-glazed stoneware - resources

Folk, living, open-air museums etc. (UK)

• East Anglia
• London area and South East
• Midlands
• Northern England
• Scotland
• South West
• Wales
• Intro page

Beds

• Press, cabinet and box beds - and bed recesses
• Breton box beds - the lit-clos
• Featherbeds, duvets, eiderdowns
• Marseilles or Marcella quilts
• Medieval beds - with glossary
• Palliasses, straw mattresses
• One-legged bedsteads in log cabins
• Bed warmers using hot coals
  Bed warmers puzzle

Other topics

• Rag rugs
• Knitting sheaths and belts for multi-tasking
• Medieval tablecloths
• Tallow candles and candle-snuffers
• Rushlight dips & nips
• Brooms & besoms
• Buckets made by coopers
• Watering pots
• Baby walkers
• Peat fires
• Scrubbing with stone, sand etc.
• Setting up home in 17th century London
• Fireplaces
• Hanging chimneys, hingin lums
• Earth closets
• Living on the move
• Victorian cold frames - cucumber frames
• Washing and cleaning for a duke in 17th century England
• Edward Beetham - biography of 1790s washing machine promoter

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