CHIEFTAIN PHOTOS/ MIKE SWEENEY The Tibbe-Line slips over a rope and has holes to hold clothes hangers. Inventor Rose Pacheco uses hers to dry her clothes outside.Pueblo woman has simple invention, big dreams for it

By JAMES AMOS
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN
It's not a complicated invention. It's not high-tech and it's not the next candidate for a fashion fad.
Instead, it's simple and its inventor, Rose Pacheco, says it saves time and electricity.
A cosmetologist by day, Pacheco has invented what she calls the Tibbe-Line, a flexible plastic sleeve that slides over a clothesline or other rope and allows a person to hang clothes hangers on it.
The sleeves, each measuring 13 inches long, have holes drilled in them for the hanger hooks so that all the clothes don't slide together at the clothesline's lowest point. They work for drying clothes and for storing clothes anywhere someone can rig up a line, she says.
It's a simple little device, but Pacheco thinks it has a huge future by allowing people to air-dry their clothes easier and use less electricity and time.
"People who have bought my Tibbe-Line call or write me and they're so excited about doing laundry," the energetic Pacheco said. "They're excited because they're saving time."
The Tibbe-Line retails for $14.95 for a pack of three, enough to hold 21 hangers in 39 inches of space.
Pacheco says there's nothing on the market like it.
"It hasn't taken off yet, but I believe it will," she said of her product, named for her maiden name of Tibbe. "It's like a dam that has a little hole in it."

TIME IS important to Pacheco, a cosmetologist who works with the home-bound and who also makes balloon arrangements for special occasions and events. She's a super-energetic 60 years old and confesses that she has a hard time not being constantly in motion.
"I've worked just about my whole life," the Pueblo native said, "At the IRS, the Army Depot, the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, I've done a lot of different things.
"The only time I find that I can actually stay still is when I'm reading the Bible," she said. "Otherwise I'm always doing something."
So her hard work with the Tibbe-Line is not surprising. She's taken the device to trade shows, has a demonstration planned at Colorado State University-Pueblo to show college students and is contacting 2,000 additional colleges and universities to see if she can convince students there to buy it, too.
"I had never been in a college dorm," she said about when she first visited the university to drum up business for the Tibbe-Line. "I walked in and I couldn't believe it. It was 12 feet by 12 feet with two little beds, two little dressers, and two inky-dinky closets."
Because she markets the Tibbe-Line as a laundry aid and a storage device, Pacheco saw opportunity. "My Tibbe-Line would be perfect," she said.

Pacheco hangs clothes on her Tibbe-Lines, which are plastic sleeves that slide over a clothesline or other rope and hold clothes hangers so the clothes may dry or be stored.THE TIBBE-LINE was born shortly after Pacheco was doing laundry one day in 1996. She likes to air-dry her clothes, but some clothes need to be placed on a hanger first to dry without being distorted.
Pacheco hung her clothes on a clothesline the regular way with clothespins, and then hung a heavy denim shirt on a hanger and hung that in the eye-bolt holding up the clothesline.
A strong wind that day blew most of Pacheco's clothing to the ground, but the denim shirt "was just whipping around in the wind and didn't fall down," she said.
Later, Pacheco caught herself looking at a door hinge and that's when she says the Holy Spirit touched her and the whole idea all fell into place: a plastic device that could be closed around a clothesline and hold hangers at regular intervals.
Pacheco loves her invention because she likes to dry her clothes in the dryer for a short time to remove much of the water, then hang the clothes damp on hangers and let them air-dry.
She's cut her laundry time dramatically, she says, because she doesn't have to wait for the entire dryer cycle to finish. It also saves wear and tear on the clothes and saves electricity, which Pacheco sees as a major selling point.
When she made the first Tibbe-Line, people didn't care as much about global warming and saving energy, she said. But now, "when you turn the TV on, at least once a week that subject comes up. There is nothing, nothing, nothing like this!"

BRINGING AN INVENTION from idea to reality, and then actually selling it, is a famously hard and long process. The inventing landscape is littered with the corpses of ideas that someone just couldn't get to catch on.
Pacheco said it's taken her at least six years and $25,000 to bring the Tibbe-Line to life. After she had her idea, Pacheco says she got a lot of timely help from other people getting it made. She already was going to the Pueblo Community College campus' Small Business Development Center to discuss applying for a small-business loan for her cosmetology work. When Pacheco asked for help on her Tibbe-Line, someone at the development center directed her to PCC engineer and teacher Chris Washington, who was nice enough to draw up plans for the Tibbe-Line from Pacheco's description.
Pacheco then found a plastics manufacturer in Denver that made a batch of the Tibbe-Lines, and after a friend made her a jig for them, Pacheco used a drill press to drill holes in each Tibbe-Line herself before packaging them for sale.
"I got to where I could do 100 Tibbe-Lines an hour," Pacheco said.
Pacheco also hired an attorney and, after being rejected twice, obtained a patent for her invention, spending thousands of dollars to do it.

Several Tibbe-Line packages await shipping.ACTUALLY SELLING the Tibbe-Lines has taken even more effort.
Pacheco has set up a Web site at www.tibbeline.com and sells some through that venue. She's also traveled a bit to market the device and constantly is honing her pitch and identifying uses for the invention.
While she was at a trade show, one comment she heard again and again was that the adults at the show wished they'd had something like the Tibbe-Line when they were in college and short on time, space and quarters for the dryers. That started Pacheco on her present marketing push with the colleges.
And she said she's always finding more uses for the invention. An artist friend likes them for holding painting materials. A teacher uses Tibbe-Lines to hang kids' projects.
"If there's someone who can't find one good reason for using the Tibbe-Line, they must be from Mars!" she said.
Sales are still very modest, but Pacheco keeps at it.
"The only reason is because the Holy Spirit gave me the idea, otherwise I would have probably given up on it."
She says each time she's faced an obstacle, something eventually has happened to help her get past it, "and away I go.
"It is a long, hard road," she said. "You just have to have a lot of tenacity. And I remind myself of a pit bull."