When our creative director uncovered her great-grandmother's textile notebooks, she discovered a wealth of clothing-care wisdom. Read on for 20+ tips that feel just as relevant as they did 100 years ago.

My Oma can remove a stain that, by all accounts, should be permanent.She grew up during the war in Holland and never quite lost the instinct that came with it: a full pantry, nothing wasted, always prepared. Wildly tenacious. Entrepreneurial in the truest sense. Impatient with laziness, meticulous about doing things properly. The last one standing on the dance floor. The sort of person who has never encountered a problem she didn't believe she could solve, and has usually been right.Growing up, she'd come over to our house and quietly transform chaos into order. Washing would reappear neatly pressed in perfect piles on our beds. Stains vanished. White shirts stayed white. Torn hems were repaired before you even realised they'd come undone. Caring for things was simply how she moved through the world.As someone who inherited a quarter of her Dutch blood but apparently none of her laundry skills, I've always admired it, and felt quietly guilty about how little of it I've absorbed. So when I had the idea to write a piece on caring for clothes, I knew exactly where to start: with Oma. What I didn't expect was what she'd pull out.

Notebooks belonging to my overgrootoma, my great-grandmother, written by Oma's mother when she was just 17 years old, in the 1920s, during her final years at finishing school in Holland. This was an era when women receiving this kind of formal education was still relatively rare. The fact that she…