How long does bedding last?

[Hot Flatus]

Poppers melt if you iron them 

What happens if you sniff them?

[quixoticgeek]

Charity shops often sell unusable fabric items to commercial recyclers - mark the bags as containing rags, and they get some money per kilo.

If you have duvets which are too holey to be useable but the fabric is mostly okay, then look up if there is a Morsbag group near you: https://morsbags.com/pods/
The idea is that groups turn donated fabric into cloth bags which are then given away. My local group meet once a month to cut fabric and sew bags. The bags are given to the local food bank (who find they are easier to use than plastic bags) and given away at village fetes etc. Our group has been running for nearly ten years now, it's really fun seeing our bags out and about.

When I worked in a bike shop we would get a box of rags delivered every now and then, which we would use to clean bits of bike and the like. Very useful.

J

[Mrs Pingu]

Poppers melt if you iron them 

Life is too short to be ironing bedding. (Or anything, for that matter).

[quixoticgeek]

Life is too short to be ironing bedding. (Or anything, for that matter).

Only time I iron anything is before a job interview.

Tho given the last interview I did I dropped an f bomb, and showed my balls to the camera[1], and still got the job, I do wonder if such things are necessary.


J

[1] a pair of 25mm stainless steel ball bearings that live on my desk, after a former colleague told me I need balls to work in IT...

[quixoticgeek]

Many high streets often have a places that will replace the elastic.  We have a dry cleaners that offers such repairs, if you don’t want or can’t do it for yourself.

I could probably do it myself, tho I don't have a sewing machine, so would have to do so by hand. But buying some new elastic would cost me probably about €4 in public transport to get to a shop where I can buy materials. Plus my time. It feels hard to just that, or paying someone to fix it, when I can get a new one for €11, or a better one for €19. Which sucks. Esp given the environmental impact of cotton production. I'm not sure what I could recycle the sheet into. I don't really do cushions which would be an obvious one, and it's not really clothing fabric.

Economically, the best option is order a new sheet.

Environmentally the best option is to ignore the fact the elastic has failed and adjust the sheet every night.

J

[fruitcake]

I used to buy fitted sheets until I realised that their fit was dependant upon the thickness of the mattress, and they would always be a poor fit on some beds.

Plain sheets stay put by being large and the excess material being weighed down by the mattress, so they just work.

On replacing elastic, I having a sewing machine, but am not sure I would bother to replace fitted sheet elastic. I would definitely not attempt the job by hand because hand stitching is weaker than machine stitching.

On what to do with surplus textiles, I cut them up for cleaning rags. A stack of cotton rags is a useful thing to have in the bathroom where surfaces need to be cleaned regularly. These rags are useful because they are tougher than a cleaning sponge (or the commercially available cleaning cloths) but not as abrasive as a scouring pad. I wash and reuse them until they're worn out, at which point they can be composted. I keep another stack of rags for cleaning bikes.There it's useful to have some thick fabric rags and some thinner ones. 

[Cudzoziemiec]

Many high streets often have a places that will replace the elastic.  We have a dry cleaners that offers such repairs, if you don’t want or can’t do it for yourself.

I could probably do it myself, tho I don't have a sewing machine, so would have to do so by hand. But buying some new elastic would cost me probably about €4 in public transport to get to a shop where I can buy materials. Plus my time. It feels hard to just that, or paying someone to fix it, when I can get a new one for €11, or a better one for €19. Which sucks. Esp given the environmental impact of cotton production. I'm not sure what I could recycle the sheet into. I don't really do cushions which would be an obvious one, and it's not really clothing fabric.

Economically, the best option is order a new sheet.

Environmentally the best option is to ignore the fact the elastic has failed and adjust the sheet every night.

J

Surely you would cycle to the haberdasher's?

[Paul H]

I could probably do it myself, tho I don't have a sewing machine, so would have to do so by hand.

if it's the design where the elastic is in a hem, you wouldn't use a sewing machine, even if you have one.  It requires a cm of stitching at each end of the hem to be unpicked, and mew elastic pulled through and tacked back on.   
A cheat on that, would be to cut a slit in the hem and shorten the elastic with a knot, that'd fray over time, but you'd get another year or two with zero cost or sewing.

[fruitcake]

Paul is right. The elastic runs in a 'case' - a fold in the fabric and a line of stitching all the way round. You could snip the case at one point and pull out the old elastic. You push the new elastic through with the help of a bead tied to one end, then join it (or tie it) at the correct length. Then you just need to mend the cut you made to the case, and handstitches will do that. I remember seeing my grandmother doing this!

BTW I reckon it's UV light that kills elastic by degrading the rubber.

[T42]

What does the collective do with redundant bedding ?

That's what designated AONB's are for.

[Mr Larrington]

Poppers melt if you iron them 

Life is too short to be ironing bedding. (Or anything, for that matter).

AOL, +1 etc.

[Wombat]

Your local vet might thank you for old towels and possibly old sheets. A lot of my deceased mother's towels ended up at our local vets

I took some to our vets on Wednesday, and they were very pleased.
Our local heritage railway likes all sorts of cloth products including sheets, as looking after manky steam and diesel locos involves a LOT of wiping greasy muck. Comically I volunteer for suc a railway, but took the towels across the road to the vets instead!  Well, they look after our daft mog, so they're good people.

[rogerzilla]

"Cotton waste" was always in demand on railways.