Practical Laundry Work for Home and School by Louise Wetenhall is a detailed illustrated guide to the handling, washing, ironing, folding, and packing of household linen and clothing. The New York edition from E. P. Dutton & Company is catalogued as 1915; its title page is undated. Wetenhall taught trade laundry work at the Borough Polytechnic Institution in London, and her explanations draw on both classroom teaching and commercial practice.
Following the work from sorting to packing
The handbook treats laundry as an organized sequence. It begins with sorting and preparing linen, then adds trade notes about keeping customers’ articles separate, arranging the sorting room, and preventing errors. These opening pages show why a satisfactory result depends on much more than the washing itself. Order, identification, and the movement of work between stages receive sustained attention.
The preface describes the book as help for beginners at home and in the trade, as well as students and intending teachers. Illustrations by Ethel R. Hambridge were designed to make the methods clear enough for classroom demonstration. Drawings and photographs work together throughout the volume, with many diagrams showing the position of a garment or the direction of a fold.
Materials, equipment, and washing processes
The early chapters describe materials for washing, stain treatment, and laundry equipment. They discuss water, soap, starch, and other substances familiar to the period, alongside tubs, wringers, mangles, clothes lines, ironing boards, and different irons. This is a useful record of the working vocabulary and equipment of an early twentieth-century laundry.
Separate sections consider starches and their preparation, followed by washing and starching cotton and household linen. The book then turns to drying, folding, ironing, and finishing. It makes distinctions between kinds of articles rather than assuming that every fabric should pass through an identical routine. For modern readers, that attention to the construction and intended finish of an item is a central theme of the work.
Household linen and the art of folding
Tablecloths, serviettes, fancy folding, tray cloths, doylies, cushion covers, tea cloths, bedspreads, towels, pillow slips, and curtains all appear in the contents. The illustrated folding instructions are among the book’s most distinctive features. Instead of presenting only a finished arrangement, the diagrams break the work into stages and show how corners, edges, and layers relate to one another.
These pages will interest readers studying domestic textiles, historical housekeeping, and the presentation of household linen. They also demonstrate the care once devoted to finishing an article after it was clean. Wetenhall repeatedly connects the handling of the material with the appearance of the completed work, so the illustrations are worth examining alongside the written explanation.
Garments, delicate fabrics, and special finishes
A large part of the volume is devoted to particular garments and fabrics. There are chapters on ironing body linen, muslin and lace garments, and shirts, collars, and waistcoats. The shirt work includes polishing and folding, while other sections address frills, pleating, crimping, and related finishing techniques. Photographs show operations at the ironing table, and diagrams clarify the arrangement of sleeves and other shaped pieces.
Later chapters cover flannels, blankets, socks and stockings, coloured articles, silks, satins, chiffons, lace, gloves, eiderdown quilts, wadded garments, knitted coats, velveteens, and serge. This variety makes the book useful as a historical reference for textile care rather than simply a set of washday instructions. It closes with packing laundered articles and trade notes on that final stage.
How to approach this historical handbook
Readers interested in household skills, clothing history, textile collections, and self-sufficiency references will find a substantial account of skilled domestic work. The organization makes it possible to consult a particular fabric or operation, while the full sequence explains how a laundry was managed as a coordinated workplace.
The materials, chemical treatments, heating methods, and equipment belong to the book’s period. Treat its recipes and stain-removal directions as historical information; use current garment labels and product instructions for actual washing and cleaning. The scanned PDF preserves the original cloth cover, aged pages, drawings, and photographs. It includes searchable text, but recognition errors occur, so the page images should be consulted when a term or measurement is unclear.
Book details
- Title: Practical Laundry Work for Home and School
- Author: Louise Wetenhall
- Illustrator: Ethel R. Hambridge
- Foreword: E. M. Burgwin
- Publisher: E. P. Dutton & Company, New York; printed by Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, London
- Publication: Catalogued as 1915; title page undated; no numbered edition stated
- Language: English
- Format: Illustrated scanned PDF, 179 digital pages
- File size: 6.87 MB (6,866,781 bytes)
- Subjects: Laundry organization, textile care, washing, ironing, folding, packing, household linen
