Garb Fabric Issue

I bought some linen (actually linen-rayon blend) fabric a while back to make garb. One length was apparently without sizing, or at least didn't have much. I washed it and threw it in a nice hot dryer, and it came out fairly soft. I then dyed it with RIT dye and the result is a beautifully soft fabric in a lovely medium greyish blue shade.

The other, much longer, length came from a bolt that must have had an enormous amount of sizing applied. I've washed it twice now, using hot water, detergent and a generous dose of fabric softener added to the rinse water, dried it in a hot dryer and it is STILL stiff and scratchy (although admittedly, somewhat less so than when I began). I was hoping to leave this fabric white and use it in chemises but there's no way I want it next to my skin the way it feels at present. Is there some way for me to soften it up, or am I going to have to break down and dye it for use in outer garments, in the hopes that the dyeing process will soften it up some? And before anyone suggests it, no, it's too stiff and scratchy for me to want to tough it out over a few/several wearings in the hope that it will soften up on its own. I'm sure it would be entertaining to watch me trying to discreetly scratch and squirm at an event, but I'm not planning to give everyone the pleasure.

Too Funny!

"The Blogofractal" Check it out, you'll love it.
http://xkcd.com/124

I Survived the Seventies

And if you did, too, you might get a kick out of reading this blog entry over at Johnny Virgil's "15 Minute Lunch", complete with photos and hilarious commentary. Heck, you might enjoy it even if you're too young to remember 1977, or hadn't been born yet.

Click the link. You know you want to. ;-)

Veteran Returns Home, Finds Nasty Surprise

Local soldier returns to find home ransacked and stripped of fixtures, pipes

CLEVELAND -- Sergeant Gertie Lynn was counting the days until she could return to the home she'd purchased last year in Cleveland's Lee-Harvard neighborhood.

Imagine her shock last week when she went home and found thieves had ransacked her possessions and stripped the house of piping, fixtures and building materials.

"I was very angry, very angry. What a wonderful Veterans Day," she said.

Lynn lost electronics, CD's, her daughter's athletic equipment, copper piping, a water heater, insulation and drywall.

She had dreamed of owning the house in the neighborhood she grew up in.

"It's so small and cute. I told my aunt I'd own that house one day," she said.

She has not totalled up the value of what was taken. And she fears her insurance may have lapsed because she hadn't received all her mail.

Her aunt, Margeree Pittman of Bedford Heights, was doing weekly security checks of the house. But she couldn't recently when she was hospitalized for a month.

"It's just horrible. It's just unforgivable that someone would do somebody like that," Pittman said.

Sgt. Lynn was serving with a medical unit in Germany, collecting blood needed for wounded fighting men and women in Iraq.

She will soon return to her job here as a nurses' aide in a psychiatric hospital.

She's presently staying with her aunt.

Councilwoman Nina Turner and the USO are exploring possible ways to help Sgt. Lynn through donations and help from businesses.

Sgt. Lynn says she's eager to return to duty, but only after she's settled in and made sure her home is protected.

There's video, too.

This sort of thing just makes me seethe. And it made the anchorwoman on our evening news so angry that she could barely speak after reading the story.

Stargate Ikea

Found this on another blog. Worth a look, as is much of the other material there.

Enjoy!

Cutting-edge 16th-century technology

Here's a neat gadget, ca. 1590, with an interesting combination of functions.

It's pretty, too.

Will Play For Food

Check this out:

FreeRice.com

This is a cool site for word lovers. You answer vocabulary questions which get progressively more difficult based on the number of correct answers you give, and for each correct answer, 10 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program. Okay, so 10 grains of rice doesn't sound like much, but imagine many thousands of people playing this game every day and generating 10 grains for each correct answer. That adds up.

Besides, it's fun, and can add to your vocabulary. ;-)

(Thanks to Malthus who posted that link in a comment on Making Light, because that's where I found it.)