I always wash my dress shirts in my Miele washer, either on the shirts cycle, which I think is called something else in countries outside of the U.S.A or on the perm press cycle. I hang everything even t shirts up as they come out of the dryer so most times no ironing is involved. The exception -- thin linen shirts. I send these straight to the professional cleaners who insist on starching them even while I say no starch. We have finally reached an understanding that when I say no starch I MEAN NO STARCH. I understand why they want to starch them because without starch they return to me looking like something I might have done myself..but that is the way I want them soft without starch. This year I bought wrinkle free linen shirts which seem to work OK in the washer. I wash wool using the wool cycle, and silk using the silk cycle, but do not wash 100% or 95% wool dress slacks in the washer...I they go to the professionals. I use PERWOL for wool and silk.

First off let me say I am a lover of natural fabrics. Most of my wardrobe is fully cotton, linen, wool or raw silk. It's higher maintenance but I still do my laundry in a wringer machine and hang it on a line. But if you have one perma-press article in your house or on your body, on your beds or over your towel racks, you are using blends with the high likelihood they're polyester. If I am making an heirloom type quilt for a gift, or doing the block exchanges where I know full cotton material is expected, it will be cotton but I am very likely to use some poly blends in those I intend to keep and use on a daily basis on my own beds. Those in my home do not get treated gently. They go in the machine with the rest of the clothing on a routine basis. The dog sleeps on them. Nobody takes them off the beds and folds them carefully when they retire for the night. They are used just like any other blanket and so far they've stood up to the test for about five years and are none the worse for wear. I quilt for the joy of it but expect my goods to be functional. The first quilter I ever knew was my mother in law, a poor farm woman whose quilts were made from coats, blankets, old clothing, grain sacks and any other place she could get material. They had that old charm about them the most carefully made quilt of the finest material usually falls a bit short of because they catch the essence of what quilting was for many years.......a frugal way to express yourself and it was the territory of people with more creative drive than money. We are plain-living people and live in a two hundred year old house in the country and those 'tacky' quilts look just fine on our beds and over our chairs. It matches the rest of the furnishings, many of which are also hand-made or older than our parents. I have several very old quilts or quilt pieces and have looked at the quality of the materials in those and the workmanship. They're made of whatever was handy, and batted with even more questionable material......and the only reason most are cotton is that was what was available. The 1918 crazy quilt piece I have hung on my sewing room wall would be considered a monstrosity today, both in the ugliness of material and the craftmanship. LOL. But it has a certain charm. So, do I put effort in on my scrap quilts with old or recycled material? Sure because I don't watch television and it's a way to be creative and use that time and have somthing useable to show for it. I suspect we are heading for a 'new' depression with our economy. Cotton prices are also sky-rocketing and as we have all noticed the quality of the materials are declining. I figure a lot of us who quilt will once again start figuring out ways to make use of what is at-hand. It's quite alright that you might not agree with my take on it, because quilting is a folk art and we each see it in our own paradigm.

I wash my hands about that many times a day. We keep handi-wipes in the car and wash after each store we go in. We also have been using one after looking at the menus in restaurants because I read the menus are one of the dirtest things in a restaurant. We both have colds now, something rare for us, and blame shaking hands at church for that. I wish they would stop telling us to greet someone.

RN, the sequins and beads were sewn on to lace. They lost none of their luster in the wash. I was afraid if i soaked just the bottoms of the gowns the soaked fabrics would behave differently from the unsoaked fabrics and trims, so I pushed the entire gown into the machine for the soak and wash. Every bit of the black dirt on the hems and trains is gone. One girl was married in a garden so you can imagine what that was like, the other was married in a children's museum and the wine drips on the front are absolutely gone! I only air dried the gowns in the dryer for several minutes to get the layers fluffed, then hung them on doors to dry. That took days! I fluffed and readjusted repeatedly, but in the end both gowns are perfect and we saved hundreds of dollars. Re The cleaning and preserving: My own gown was preserved in 1968. When we opened it before my eldest dtrs wedding in 1996, all the silver baguettes my mother had sewn on my lace had turned black, and the little seed pearls had lost their luster. It was awful, completely studded with black spots, so useless for any purpose at all. For some reason, I saved it anyway! We Good luck with the project!