Monday is often...

ironing day. this morning I ironed this stack of four table cloths. The bottom one is about 120 inches long and we just used it Friday . It's a cotton rayon damask blend,that I had made, and not all that difficult to iron despite it's huge size.

The next cloth up in the stack is another one which I made. It is a cotton pique, with multicolor pom pom fringe. My friend Mary Katherine loves pompom trim and gave me a bunch of random lengths from her collection. They all trim the cloth. Yes, the look is pretty silly. This cloth fits our dining room table in it's unexpanded size. It is about 90 inches long.

Next up in the stack, is a cloth made out an Ikea print. It has a Matisse like look and is pretty horrible to iron. The only consolation is that it looks great on the table and terrific with our dishes. This too is for the unexpanded table.

The top cloth is one of the many vintage cloths I inherited from my mother in law. It is a 52 inch square of cotton, also not so great to iron. I tend to use the smaller cloths to hide the not so lovely stains in the center of the black cloth.

Why do I bother ironing table cloths? I am not as careful and as refined a housekeeper as my mother. My mother irones everything, and does it well. My mother in law, on the other hand went decades without using her iron.

I iron my table cloths mostly for reasons of space. There is no way to store the cloths if I don't iron them, so I do. A sewing frined recently commented to me that there is no way to iron large objects on a small ironing board. I had to laugh. My ironing board is one of those small table top models. I set it up on my kitchen counter.I just haven't the space to store or to set up a big board. I iron large scale stuff on that little board all the time. Not with great joy, mind you but it works.

My friend Renee had a mother who worked in the schmatta trades. Renee inherited her mother's electric mangle. I covet that mangle each time I iron the big table cloths, but given our lack of storage space, although I would like to use that mangle, I don't think I would like to actually have it in my house.

Because I work at home. I usually spend my day drifting between doing client work and housework. Many of the tasks overlap. So I will do pressing for say a tallit while I'm also ironing dress shirts, or in this case, table cloths

This is a bonus preview of my next tallit. This is a detail of the atara. can you guess the color of the tallit???