Post season clothes care

 Many people wonder why I go home a day early from Medieval week in Visby. The reason is pretty easy. Medieval week is my last week of holiday and travel time with both ferry and then driving home it takes a whole day. Then when I come home I need to take care of the clothes and equipment, and that takes a full day. I need to do it immediately, because after a week of working in the camp kitchen they stink of smoke.

Medieval week is the last big event of the reenactment season, some times smaller events pop up, that also means that I want to give the clothes some proper cleaning before packing them away for what can be several months until the next time we use them.

I live in a small apartment without a bathtub and without access to a balcony or garden so this is what I do with my historical clothes.

The first thing I did when we came home was to take out all the things of linen and cotton, so our shifts/shirts and kitchen textiles. I rubbed in some Galltvål on special stains and on the cuffs and collars where they linen had turned grey/yellowish. Galltvål is a brand but the kind of soap is also called "gall soap or bile soap" in English. Before going to bed I switched water, but didn't rinse the clothes, and this time I didn't rubb in extra soap, I just put some in the water.

As is common in Sweden our apartment has access to a washing room and I had made sure to book it before going to Visby. The linen and cottons were both put in a washing machine with regular washing powder and 60 degrees wash cycles.

For the wool I put the sweatiest pieces, that is our hoses, David's short hose and my underkirtle in the machine with a gentle wool washing liquid and on a wool cycle. I put the red pieces in a separate machine together with some paper that soaks up the extra dye that they are still shedding a lot of.

 Then I went into our common garder and occupied the patio. I put the white linen pieces in the sun, and on the grass, to get some extra bleaching. The wool was hung up to either dry, or in the case of our hats, gollars, double and overkirtle just air out the smoke. The non-white linen was simply hung over furniture and the like.

It was quite a windy day so I had to catch pieces that flew away from time to time, but it also made everything dry and fresh in a fairly short amount of time. When hanging the clohtes up it was also easy to spot holes and seams that had come undone. All those pieces go into my mending/fixing pile that I can take up in the coming months when I don't have anything else to do.

Then the clothes are all packed away in plastic boxes in my storage in the attic. I have never had problems with moths or the like but I am sure to put plenty of cedar wood pieces in the boxes to ward of any unwelcome guests.