All will come out in the washing

I do a lot of laundry. Piles of the stuff. Monday through Sunday; dawn til dusk. There’s only four of us, but we sure as heck are one filthy family.

As most who have met me would attest, I’m not what you would call house proud. When I have visitors to the house, its always a case of "Excuse me. Sorry. Please don't trip over that. Ohhh, don't look in there. I'll just move those things off the couch, so you can sit down.". But I do like to get the washing right.

I pride myself on being able to remove avocado and tomato stains. On making my whites bright. And keeping a bunch of boys clothes smelling sweet. I’m the main launderer in our house. In our early days together, Mr Hoppo Bumpo made a number of laundry errors that involved lambs wool, a hot wash and a tumble drier. He has since been banished from the laundry. Didn't he read the labels?

Which got me to thinking. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have fabric care directions stitched into handmade garments. (At this point you'll either be thinking "what a great idea" or "this woman is a complete nutcase"). Having just looked at Nikkishell’s Burdastyle tutorial on making sew-in labels, I was inspired to give the idea a go.

To begin, I hunted around for laundry and dry cleaning symbols. I found a very nice True Type Font by preussTYPE in Germany. It gives all the standard symbols for fabric care. Perfect. So after purchasing and installing it on my PC, I made up a sheet of labels in Microsoft Word.

Next, according to the tutorial, all I needed to do was mirror image print my labels onto transfer paper. That is of course where the hideous printer incident occured the other night. But the laser printer has recovered (I knew those overlocker tweezers were going to be handy for other stuff) and I think Mr Hoppo Bumpo has forgiven me. The inkjet printer worked a treat.

So I have ironed transfers onto my first labels. These fabric care labels have been made with a favorite in mind - corduroy. That would be: warm machine wash; do not bleach; do not tumble dry; warm iron. Mr Hoppo Bumpo, take note.

Now its just a matter of getting back to my big "to do" list and actually sewing the clothes that these labels are destined for.