Thread Drift

[OakLeaf]

in winter, it can take a good 50 minutes to dry just half of the load.

Yikes!

There's a Fellini movie, I want to say 8-1/2? that has a brief scene showing women doing laundry, and to dry the bedlinens, they had these huge wooden hemispherical frames in a covered atrium.

I wonder what people in humid climates did before dryers were common. Where we live in Florida, on a sunny day when the humidity's "normal," we have about a three-hour window where we can dry laundry outdoors before the humidity comes up so high that they start getting more damp instead of less. If it isn't sunny, forget about it. I used my dryer more in Florida this December and January than I did the whole rest of the year. Put together. Not exaggerating.

Even in northern climates where indoor heating dries everything out, many if not most people wouldn't have had enough space for drying bedlinens. I have no idea what they did. Heck I live very close to lots of Amish and Mennonite people who don't have dryers, and I know they'll dry laundry on their porches if the weather is even remotely hospitable to that, but when it isn't, I don't know any of them well enough to ask!