The humble clothes peg – what would we do without it? Most of us don’t give it a second thought unless it’s laundry day, but there’s more to this clever little tool than many of us realise. Next, the clothes peg supplier will share the following content with you.
Practical and relatively newfangled they may be; but clothes pegs also carry overtones of ancient mystery. In Britain they were made from two woods, willow and hazel, with magical associations. (Americans prefer ash and beech.) Willow is therapeutic, and soothes pain. In many cultures it is a tree of conversation and communion, of secret answers shrouded by leaves beside singing rivers.
Its wood has something of the spring of water in it: that same elasticity that allows it to be woven into fences, baskets and traps, and can be sensed when a cricket bat, the finest use of willow, shivers under the ball. Hazel is watery, too: the favourite wood for dousing. The dowser’s forked stick is like nothing so much as a larger-scale peg, with the legs pulled outward.
Clothes Peg
Traditionally, a clothes peg, or clothespin, was a very basic wooden stick carved with a slit in the end, which was simply pushed over the washing to fix it to the line, and was called a ‘dolly peg’. The earliest wooden pegs were even simpler than this, consisting of a short piece of tree branch with a split at one end, often with a piece of metal wrapped around the other end to prevent it splitting any further.
Victorian dolly pegs tended to be a lot bigger than modern pegs due to the heavy nature of clothes and sheets at that time. This type of peg was also a cheap and popular toy for children to play with – being almost human-shaped with a round head and two ‘legs’, it would often be decorated and turned into a ‘peg dolly’!
The first patented design that resembles the modern spring-hinged peg we all recognise today was invented in 1853 – made with two wooden ‘levers’ attached together by a metal spring, this peg was designed to open and close so it would pinch the washing to the line, rather than wedging it.
The basic design hasn’t changed very much since then, but modern pegs tend to be made of plastic rather than wood these days, and consist of two interlocking plastic legs with a single metal coil spring wedged between them, which makes them stronger and easier to use.
