The Jersey City news. (Jersey City [N.J.]) 1889-1906, 1890-01-15
HOW TO DUST A ROOM.
A Woman Who Thinks There Should
Be a Method in This Work.

The feather buster is an abomina-
ton, writes Christina Terhune Her
rick in a recent number of The House
Wife. In the hands of a careless house,
maid it is flirted among the furniture,
up about the picture frames, down
amid the chair rungs, into hooks and
corners, scattering the dust every
where, brushing the im%palpable pow
der from one spot and driving it into
another, until, when the maid retires
from her labors, all the dust in the
room has changed its place. while but
little Of it has been permanently re-
moved.
There should be a method of dust
ing and it should be closely followed.
First of all the carpet should be
brushed. A thorough sweeping may
not be necessary, but in most living
rooms there is a daily need of a carpet
sweeper or dust pan and brush, often
of all three. The carpet sweeper is
admirable for taking up the dirt in
the middle of the room, but prac-
tically useless in corners. Every
~housekeeper should have one of the
dust pans that CAM be held in place
by the foot. The gain in comfort is
Unreasonable to the woman who has
been accustomed to been herself
double when she wished to brush up
the fluff that she had gathered to-
gether with her broom.
The high places of the room should
next receive attention, the ccrnices,
curtain poles, etc. A Turks head
brush is Invaluable here and is easily
improyised by tying a cloth or towel
around a feather buster and attaching
this to the end of a pole long enough
to enable one to touch the ceiling
with the brush.
For the other parts of the room q
cloth must be used. Old silk hand
kerchiefs make excellent busters, but
even they are not superior to those OF
cheese cloth. These should not be
too large. A buster a yard long by
half a yard wide is big enough for all
ordinary purposes. Cheese cloth IS
so cheap that there Is no reason why
every family should not be provided
with a generous supply of busters.
They must be hemlned, OF course,
and may be prettily finished by a
feather stitching of bright marking
cotton. Such busters will go into all
the hooks and corners, gathering up
the dust and retaining it. They
should be shaken after using and
washed frequently. 1t is a tedious
business to dust the modern parlor.
Filled with bric-a-brac, adorned with
hangings over doors, windows and
mantels, ornamented with bits of
drapery flung over easels and picture
frames, it presents a discouraging as
pect to the busy housewife. +
One must pay for having pretty and
artistic surroundings, but, as long as
the dust gathering agencies are kept
out of sleeping rooms, little harm is
done. EVERYTHING should be moved in
busting. There should be no dusty
rims left around ornaments to show
how the cloth SKINNED around them
without touching them. Such care
lessness must be watched for in the
housemaid, whose study often is to
slight skillfully instead OF to perform
her task thoroughly.
For busting tufted furniture, moth
ing is better than an ordinary house
painting brush. The bristles go into
every creyice aud fold of the covering
and fray the material less than do the
straws of a whisk broom.