Does anyone besides me remember old-fashioned curtain stretchers? When I was little people dried their clothes on a clothesline (no dryers back then). But if you hung curtains on a clothesline they would dry crooked and not hang straight when you put them back up, so we used a curtain stretcher to dry them.
We had lots of lace curtains in our large, old home. Washing them was really easier than it sounds because we had a curtain stretcher on which to dry them. A curtain stretcher is a wood frame (with legs which prop it up), which has short "pins" (pointed end up) close together all around the edges. The frame could be adjusted to the size of the curtain. By setting it so there was some tension on the curtain, the curtains would dry without wrinkles and would not need pressing. (We didn't have steam irons back then).
My mom would wash our curtains and then we would hook the edges of each curtain over the pins on the stretcher frame. The pins were long enough so that we could put more than one curtain on the frame at a time. If it was a warm day we set the frame outside, and the curtains dried very quickly. When we brought them in they smelled so good because they had been air-dried, and when we hung them back up the whole house smelled fresh and clean.
Happy memories from another era...
© 2011 Arlene Schwartzkopf