Chore of the Day - Friday

In times past, Fridays were reserved for cleaning lamps and glass chimneys! Imagine having to read by lamp or candle light? Imagine having to do ANYTHING without modern lighting in our homes? No WONDER people went to bed so early in the evenings - they were ready to get up with the chickens, with only kerosene lamps to light up the nights!

We have oil lamps that we use when the power goes out, and the soot they produce darkens the glass in no time flat. Perhaps we aren't adjusting or trimming the lamp wicks properly - there must be a fine science to that, as the knowledge was not passed down in our genes. According to an old Sears & Roebuck catalog I saw, the best kerosene lamp back then only gave off 40 watts of light, and then - if the glass was blackened - good luck to ya!

Some years back, my folks went to an estate sale and bought a shoebox full of odds and ends which they gave to me. In it was some wire implements used for tatting, some wooden Belding spools (some had silk thread still wound on them!), and the neatest old light bulbs!!! The picture below is very similar to the one I own (it's packed away safely, so I scrounged and found this reasonable facsimile to show you).
It is an Edison Mazda light bulb, and the only way mine differs from the one in the photo is, that my bulb has 2 woven cords attached to the metal base. Each woven cord end with glass beads - one is white, the other is black. I wondered what the heck they were for....and so I screwed the bulb in, and it WORKS! The black bead signifies OFF, and the white bead is for ON! The bugger WORKS! And man - is it BRIGHT! It makes a sound that's a cross between a buzz and a hiss - what a step back in time as I watched this little miracle perform. An amazing invention that has changed Friday's chimney cleaning chores for homemakers FOREVER!

Chore of the Day - Thursday

How well I remember Scrub Day when I was a child! Mom would arm me with a small pail and I would have to first sweep, then wash the stair steps and side boards every week. It was not a difficult chore for a child, and I did pretty well at it. Later on, she added the chair and table legs to my list, as they collected dust on the decorative turnings and in groves designed for the look of elegance! (I try to remember these days when I pick out a new furniture piece - I don't care for the upkeep, so clean lines of mission style decor suits me well, for the most part!)
As I grew older, my most hated chore of the week was scrubbing the Dreaded Floors! Of course my sister and I only had charge of our bedroom floors upstairs - it was a dormer with hardwood floors. Dad had lovingly finished the attic with varnished wood and tongue and groove knotty pine (the wide WIDE boards!), saving the lumber money from every paycheck so he could complete the room for us girls once they knew my brother was on his way inside mommy's tummy! Sweeping that floor brought back memories of my sister and I years before, making porridge out of sawdust we found in the corners while dad cut boards - we mixed our concoctions up in the bowl of a little potty chair and fed it to our dollies and stuffed animals, or pretended to eat it ourselves!

Of course the floor would have to be washed (hands and knees, please - and don't forget the corners and baseboards!), and then - the WAX! Oh how I hated cleaning those floors! Mom always taught us the best way to complete that job is on hands and knees, if you really want that floor to be clean enough to eat off from!! Nowadays, I "cheat" and use a mop! But for those pesky corners, Momma knows best - getting down to eye level with that dust and dirt is the ONLY way to GET R DONE correctly!

Wednesdays' Chore of the Day

In times past, Wednesday was reserved for Baking....breads, rolls, coffee cakes, whatever you wished to stock your store room with for the week. The housewife would make her own yeast by grinding up potatoes to assist in attracting airborne bacteria, and would keep the yeast alive by adding potato water and never allow the yeast bowl to get cool. In addition, it must be fed daily. For more particulars OR if you'd like to try to make your very own yeast starter, click HERE.

Here is a story of my baking experience with cinnamon buns - I posted this before but for those of you who have recently joined as followers, or may have missed it, my skills in producing lovely light breads and rolls had an interesting start! Read on:

Today's featured project is Cinnamon Buns! I have been wanting to try making some goodies with yeast...and this week, the Good Lord knows I've tried! I bought Quick Rise yeast. Went through 3 packages, wasted a 5 lb bag of flour and various other ingredients. This was a costly learning experience, let me tell you!

Mr. Wonderful was so comforting. His words? "That's what they make the dough in the little round tubes for! Buy it, pop it open, stick it in the oven, and there you go!" Hmmm. Sounds good, but there's something about making them yourself....the pop and bake kind are okay, but not really the same when you want that true home-baked goodness. And so, after my many failures, I consulted: THE PROFESSIONAL!
Mom has always loved to bake tasty breads and rolls. I have fond memories of my brother and I cutting a hole in the bottom of her freshly baked bread and scooping out the soft yummy centers! We'd replace the bread on the cooling rack, and when dad would go to cut himself a slice, BOOM! All that was there was the CRUST!!! We had succeeded in hollowing out the bread and getting all the tastiness for ourselves!!! Yep - we were little scamps!!! (and made a great team!)

My own dough never did rise, despite my following the recipe to a T. It was a hard heavy ball and never budged an inch upwards, until I put it in the garbage...and the next morning, it smelled yeasty and had raised up about 1 centimeter. SO - Mom read the recipe. And we talked. Seems that the recipe called for 4 cups of flour. I added it all at once, like you might do with making a box cake mix. CINNAMON BUN FAIL!!!

We started from the beginning, testing the liquid with our wrist, pouring in the yeast packet, and following the rest of the recipe, adding 1 1/2 cups of flour to get a dough ball, and then adding scant amounts as the dough was kneaded. And please note: We did NOT use the entire amount of flour called for in the recipe!
And just look at the result!!! Loaded with cinnamon and baked to perfection!!! I took them home frosted with cream cheese frosting, and Mr. Wonderful was AMAZED that it only cost him $50 for 12 cinnamon buns! HE was "frosted"!!! Imagine THAT! But, NEXT time, the cost will be much much less - guaranteed!

Tuesdays' Chore of the Day

It stands to reason that if Wash Day was every Monday, Tuesday should be Ironing Day for every homemaker. I recall mom's electric iron and board set up in the basement. She had a green glass bottle used for the purpose of sprinkling water over the clothing. The bottle had a removable top with holes in it; the clothes would be sprinkled with water and afterward placed in a clear heavy duty plastic bag she kept nearby. It would hold the moisture in as she ironed one shirt, then she could easily reach for the next almost without stopping. A one woman assembly line! As I got older, she started me on learning to iron - dad's white hankies were the easiest. I progressed to ironing his white shirts later on - much more difficult!

The following is an excerpt about ironing from a neat "find" - It's from a vintage 1945 book called The Egg and I, by Betty MacDonald.

"Ironing with sad irons has nothing at all to do with preconceived ideas about ironing. It is a process whereby you grab a little portable handle and run over to the stove and plug it into an iron which is always covered with black. Then you run back to the ironing board and get black on your clean pillowcase. You take the iron over to the sink and wipe it off and it is of course too cool, by now, to do any good to the dirty pillowcase so you put it back on the stove and repeat the process until your husband comes in and wants to know where in HELL his lunch is.
Bob was irritatingly casual about my washing and ironing and was continually putting on clean clothes, when he could get them away from me. I got to be just like a dog with a bone over anything I had washed and ironed. It wasn't that I wanted him to act like the advertisements and come dancing into the kitchen in his underwear clutching a clean shirt and yelling "no tattle-tale gray this week, little Soft-hands!" It was just that I wanted him to be conscious of the fact that it took a terrific amount of back-breaking labor to keep us in clean clothes and occasionally to comment on it."

I have offered this book for sale in my Dark Horse Primitives etsy shop, with FREE SHIPPING in the USA, if anyone might be interested. It is hilariously funny, indicative of the times Betty lived in. She was divorced after a failed poultry business only 3 years after marrying her husband, though this is not mentioned, of course, in the book. She has written other books I have not read yet, some promise to be equally as humorous! You can find out more about this author by googling Betty MacDonald.

Mondays' Chore of the Day

Some of my first memories when I was a very young child were of clotheslines. Monday was Wash Day! We had a clothes line similar to others in the neighborhood. Women had a 'contest', of sorts, to see who could get their clothes out on the line FIRST! No prizes for that, but I'm sure it came with the pride of feeling like the best homemaker on the block!
Mom had a clothes pin bag with the plain slide on pins, and some of the new fan-dangled gripper clip-on style...much easier to get over top of jeans and thick fabrics. I recall being out in the yard on wash day while she hung out laundry. She had an expandable pen to corral me, forming a circle; when she had to run indoors for a moment, I would start wailing loudly - I didn't want to be out there by myself! She'd come out and hand me a cookie as a bribe, then race back indoors to finish up what she had going, then return to complete the laundry cycle and keep an eye on me! Sometimes she'd let me help by having me hand her the clothes pins as she told me what type she needed. As I got older, I would hand them to her with a practiced eye as I understood without being told which type she needed to pin up undies, shirts, and tablecloths.

Clothes lines at our house were for the nice weather! In winter mom would use the clothes dryer. I still remember her dumping the warm clothes out on the couch for folding! I loved to find a big towel or something cuddly to wrap up in - the heat from the dried fabrics were so comforting to a small child! It felt soooooo GOOD!

Times change and as life got busier, clotheslines came down. Today some communities don't allow such things - they're considered an 'eye sore'! I don't have a clothes line today (who knows what would fall on them as the birds zoom through the woods), but my dryer has a gentle air-toss cycle and a special feature for permanent press clothing. I've mentioned before about the troubles I've had with sour smelling towels; I traced the problem back to fabric softeners. I stopped using them, even though they have a very pleasant scent added. Now I launder everything with my chosen brand of detergent, but I use my old liquid fabric softener ball in a new way -
I fill it half full of white vinegar - the vinegar cuts the soap that might be remaining in the rinse cycle. Soap build-up can happen, and along with the build ups of fabric softeners, can actually make your clothing smell sour when you wear it a while and find yourself perspiring.

Some of us might not go back to the use of Monday Wash Day and the use of clothes lines, but we all must do laundry. If you have any Wash Day hints, please include them in your comments! I'd love to hear them!