I've written about laundry %% [[2021-03-08 Laundry]] %% and rorgoten %% [[rorgoten]] [[2021-08-04 Furtive (MF)]] %% before, but _The Laundress & the Fungal Growth_ %% [[2021-10-06 The laundress & the fungal growth (FF)]] %% goes a bit more in depth about how I feel about laundry. Which is to say that now that as an adult I've come to believe that the art of getting clothes clean is basically magic. When I was growing up, my mom worked as a dry cleaner. I think she'd been a factory seamstress before that, but I only remember the smell of dry cleaning chemicals and occasional summer days visiting the hot presses where she worked, in downtown Baltimore. I had a very different upbringing than either of my parents. Like most parents, I think, they wanted better for me than what they'd had, and that meant a life with less manual labor. I didn't have many chores growing up, and often when I did try to help out, I would mess something up and not be allowed to do it anymore. Once, I tried to help out and wash my dad's work shirts. I didn't shake them out well enough before hanging them up, and they wound up really wrinkled. I still remember how upset my mom was, and the end result was that it took me close to a decade before I ever did anyone else's laundry. These days I'm married with a kid, and if I'm being honest my husband does as much of the housework as I do if not more, but cloth diapering taught me _so much_ about laundry. I've always thought that "doing laundry correctly" was a skill that has kind of been lost in middle-class American culture, thanks to washing machines and fast fashion. Sort of like changing your own oil or mending your own socks, I guess. But even kind of knowing that, I was startled at how _true_ that emotion was. Laundry is magic. When we decided to cloth diaper our son, I threw myself into research about how to do it correctly. Cotton is widely considered the best fabric for the absorbent layer because it's soft, readily available (which is to say much cheaper than linen, I think), and very absorbent. Wool, which is also very absorbent although the oils repels liquid at first) is often used as the outer layer, so that they don't leak. Wool is also magical because it doesn't get cold when it's wet. Some people use hyperabsorbent materials like microfiber in lieu of cotton, but they tradeoff is that while yes they can absorb a lot of liquid, they also compress and spill more easily. Of course, once these fabrics have absorbed a bunch of excrement, cleaning them can be a challenge. You can't wash wool in regular detergent or you'll strip the lanolin (natural oil) out. When you do wash it, in special lanolin-rich soap, it smells like a sheep until it dries. Hard water is "hard" because it has a bunch of dissolved minerals in it. "Soft" water is really just "pure" water, but it turns out the amount of dissolved minerals has a huge impact on how well detergent works. If water is too hard, it can form a scummy film or leave spots of dissolved minerals behind once it dries. Soft water is less "abrasive" than hard water which, despite what every "buy our water softener!" vendor will tell you, actually can make it harder to rinse things clean, especially with a high-efficiency machine. Then there's the whole "enzymes matter" thing, which is to say that most respectable cloth diapering communities spend a lot of time explaining to people that you can't wash human excrement in a washing machine with lavender-water and expect it to come clean. There are reams of articles out there explaining [the difference between soap and detergent](https://www.goingzerowaste.com/blog/why-you-should-never-make-laundry-detergent/). When soap accumulates in textiles it makes them repel water, which in the case of baby diapers (or towels) is pretty terrible. If you wind up with a bunch of soap buildup in textiles there are [whole processes for "stripping" out built up soapscum](https://fortheloveofclean.com/laundry-love/homemade-detergent/testimonials-from-former-users-of-homemade-soap-photo-gallery/) with borax and some other stuff. What I'm getting at here is that in order to really do laundry well, over the long term, you wind up learning a _lot_ more chemistry than people necessarily realize, and that's the phenomenon I wanted to get at with _The Laundress and the Fungal Growth_. ## Further Reading - If you want to read a really awesome historical fantasy series where a laundress plays a starring role, written by a longtime historical reenactor whose wife reenacts as a laundress, check out the [Traitor Son Cycle](https://christiancameronauthor.com/book-series/traitor-son-cycle/) by Miles Cameron. It's an incredible series, like if Game of Thrones was written by someone who actually lived a medieval lifestyle instead of reading about medieval politics. It's one of a handful of books I've ever actually written [a review](https://eleanorkonik.com/the-traitor-son-cycle-by-miles-cameron/) for. %%[[Review of the Traitor Son Cycle by Miles Cameron]] was the incredibly important role the Queen's laundress had in the story. %%