Starching - an Experiment!

Freshly starched, crisply rustling clothes...

I starch. I've been exploring various ways to starch my period clothing. Currently I starch petticoats and cotton dresses. The dresses receive a lighter coating of starch than the undergarments.

I started out, as many do, with spray starch. Niagra Light - then moved up to heavy. I was unsatisfied. Spraying too heavily led to scorching and sticking on the iron soleplate. Never did I obtain the quality I was searching for - the crispness I had read about.

Why starch? First and foremost, to my way of thinking, is because "they" did. Without starch, my petticoats were limp, even though they were ironed. Of course it is easier just to wash and dry your underpinnings, but it wasn't giving me a sense of recreating the proper look.

Starch adds body, which should be self-evident. When you think about the bell shape of a woman's skirts, the importance of loft and body becomes clear. Since I wear a smaller hoop (period appropriate to my height), I needed a way to recreate the skirt volume that was lacking. Some women use very large hoops to create the skirt profile, I needed a way to do it with my cage (which is not all that small at 110" circumference.)

In addition, starch helps protect the garments from dirt by creating a layer that sheds the dry dirt (NOT MUD! Mud is wet and moisture is the enemy of starch)

So I moved on to other formulas. I tried liquid starch but found it to be more costly than dry starch. Fortunately, the grocery stores near me do carry dry Argo starch.

For the last couple of years I have starched and hung my garments on the line to dry. When I bring them in, I spritz them with water to recreate the dampness needed to properly iron. Starch does need to be damp when ironed in order to created the desired texture. The results -Not bad. I used this technique for a couple of years.

There was a time issue involved, though. A starched petticoat can take a day to dry, depending on atmospheric conditions. I cannot hang starched garments anywhere in my house, so I would have to plan my laundry several days to a week out from the time they needed to be worn.

I kept reading about the "mystical time" of starching - the time when the garment was at a proper degree of dampness to be effectively starched. Since I will never remember to keep checking my garments on the line, I wondered what I might be missing. Several people talked about spinning their starched garments in their washer, but I have a front loader.

Would the lack of a top loader forever bar me from experiencing the peak of starchiness? In an experiment, I put my freshly starched petticoats in my front loader and set it to final spin and anxiously hovered nearby. Obviously any additional rinse water would remove my starch, so I was ready to rescue the petticoats if needed. To my amazement, it worked - no water, just damp starchy clothes.

I rushed them upstairs to press - eureka! A very different texture from my dry then dampened petticoats. These were glossy and crackly. I suppose I could achieve the same thing by dampening my line-dried petticoats FAR more than I had thought...but this was wonderful! No time constraints involved...no weather dependency!

In retrospect, I realize that I needed to dampen my line-dried starched clothes in order to recreate the same ease of ironing. Degree of dampness required is always an unknown. I no longer iron all of my clothes the way my mother did. She would line dry clothes, sprinkle them with a sprinkling bottle and then roll them up and place in a plastic zippered ironing bag to retain the dampness.