Hey, Wishy-Washers!
Doing the laundry nowadays is as simple as loading a machine and pressing a few buttons, but this chore used to be much more involved and labor-intensive. The further back you go, the longer it took to do the laundry. And our methods of cleaning our clothes have shaped how we store and haul our dirty laundry.
In ancient times, people would tend to settle in spots nearby water sources since water is such an essential part of our lives—not just for consumption and survival, but for cleaning ourselves and our clothing as well. And back then, cleaning laundry was something practiced only by those with servants to do the chore.
And what a chore it was! A lot more than adding detergent and applying the right settings, washing clothes involved beating clothes over rocks and then scrubbing with abrasive sand or stone. After that, the clothes went into a process that we all know as the spin cycle: pounding the wet clothes with wooden tools or simply stomping them underfoot.
By the 1800s, wooden washboards had become popular to help make the chore less of a production, but, it still wasn’t until the early 1900s that the electric washing machine really cut this chore down to actual convenience. But where were laundry bags this whole time?
There’s not much record of them existing for a very long time. It seems that people stuck to wicker baskets for much of the evolution of laundry cleaning. Baskets and hampers are still the preferable choice for domestic use. However, the rise of community laundry services like your local laundromat brought people out of their homes to do their laundry and that’s when laundry bags found their time to shine.
While baskets can be beneficial to carry not just dirty clothes to the laundry room, but it can hold the clean, folded clothes to be carried back. To actually transport clothes out of your home and back, however, laundry bags are much easier to haul. As you can imagine, laundry bags are a popular and often times required item for summer camp.
Check out all the cute, stylish, and printed laundry bags we have available at our online store and enjoy picking out your favorite of our plentiful options! Bring convenience to your camp experience with your laundry bag and, as always, thanks for reading!
- John