Laundry and Mending

First of all, welcome to my blog!

Lately I've been on a kick of hand washing my own laundry. The idea came after watching some youtube videos about women in the Ukraine doing all domestic chores without mechanical assistance. Most intriguing was the women bent over a bucket, as if reaching her tippy toes and hand scrubbing the days laundry for 20 minutes. In that position I think my back would give out after 5 minutes. Well it dawned on me that most of the world does their laundry this way. It made me think and calculate...

It turns out that, the commercial washers and dryers that Chris (boyfriend) and I currently use cost $1.75/load. This may not seem like much but each washing load uses 30 gallons of water and I don't even know the amount of electricity used for drying. However, doing laundry by hand saves us $5.25/week (3 loads), winds up using 18 gallons of water per wash, less detergent and no electricity for drying. The only drawback is the drying time, it takes a little longer for clothes to dry but they end up smelling wonderful.

Here is a picture of today's hand washing soaking.

Here is another photo after the soaking with my new washboard Chris gave me for Christmas. I know it may seem like a sexist gift, but its purpose it to be more DIY.

To conclude this first post I also attended to some mending today. Chris destroys socks. He wears through them unlike anyone I've ever known. In order to save money I've attempted to repair the holes in his socks until he absolutely has to get more. The technique employed today is a knitted patch sewn onto the sock where the hole is. I chose this because I failed at darning. Tomorrow he will try them out while at work to see if it is comfy. If successful we will mend all his sock this way and save ourselves some money, for now.