Clothes Pegs lost, stolen or strayed
When I went to hang up my twinset and smalls today, I discovered all of my clothes pegs had vanished from the line. Gone! Completely gone!
Where do they go to? Perhaps they’ve teamed up with the safety pins and taken off for a dirty weekend. Or are the possums stealing them?
So I hiked off to buy more pegs only to find out that I simply cannot get wooden clothes pegs. Not for love or money. I went to three shops and all that was on offer were plastic things, the ones that snap if you hang out your bed socks.
Wooden pegs, on the other hand, are more durable. Once upon a time when it used to rain more than six days a year, you could get rusty stripes from the spring in the pegs, but these days you can leave your washing out for a month to get sun bleached if you’re too lazy to bring it in.
Doesn’t anyone make wooden pegs anymore? The ancient craft must have been superseded by the plastic stamping press and the venerable peg-makers gone the way of the Felt Hatters and the Lamplighters.
Gypsies used to make them once, things of beauty that were handed down from mother to daughter, but it looks like China has cornered the market now.
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Do you think the birds are flying off with them? (If you see tiny twin sets hanging out to dry up in a tree, hah!, then we’ll know for sure!)
Jen’s last blog post..The Rice Game, Redux
I liked the wooden pegs my mother had. They didn’t even have a metal spring; just one peg of wood, with two little feet….looking like a person standing. Just squash the cloth and the line into the peg.
henry
We can still get wooden pegs over here but they aren’t as strong as they used to be. The wood and the springs tend to be on the soft side and you find yourself using several for each article or everything flies into the mud. We can also get ‘dolly’ pegs. I was advised many years ago that in order to make pegs last longer they should be soaked over night in cold water then allowed to dry naturally. This does tend to harden the wood slightly – but I still miss the really tough variety – where one peg would hold virtually any weight (no matter how windy)!
Kloggers’s last blog post..1984 – Big Brother comes to watch us
Granny you are hilarious. I know what you mean about the clothes pegs though; they are much nicer than the pins. I read a couple other posts and couldn’t help but chuckle.
On a side note, I noticed that your disclosures about comments, theme, and text labels are all in Spanish. Was this intentional or just how the theme came?
In the UK you can get them from the people that sell items door to door – Betterware and Kleeneeze are the two companies that sell them. My mom always stocks up when the catalogues come round.
I must get someone in England to pack a carton of pegs from the catalogues into a boat for me. What about you, Grateful Guy? If they are Dolly Pegs as Kloggers and soulMerlin describe, so much the better. My Nanna used to have those and my grandfather would steal some and make little doll people for me.
And yes, Sharon, this theme came in Spanish. I wasn’t trying to improve my General Knowledge or raise the intellectual tone of this blog, I just don’t know how to put it into English.
Lol, how hilarious! I gained an extra load of pegs once when my neighbour had secretly been using my line but forgot to take her pegs home with her when she left. I need extra strong hurricane pegs around here because it’s so windy