All it takes is one red t-shirt tossed into a load of whites, and mister, you’re looking at a pile of tighty pinkies when it all comes out of the wash.If you grew up in a house where your socks never hit the floor because super-mom would catch them in mid-air and whisk them into the laundry, it might be time to learn the basics of cleaning your clothes:
Read the label, and believe it.
-- If it says dry-clean only, believe them, as it usually means that the fabric will not take kindly to water. If it says cold wash only, believe this recommendation too. Care labels, though not all that interesting to read, are in fact, incredibly useful. Don’t believe us? Then freestyle it and be amazed when you see you’ve shrunk some of your stuff to toy poodle size and have tie-dyed everything else in the machine. Hey, hot stuff.
-- A super hot dryer can shrink clothes, and in some cases burn them, so start a notch below the highest setting and check in on the dryer every 15 minutes or so, strategically removing and folding dry pieces as you go along. Not only will you get the jump on folding, but it will allow more air to circulate in the dryer, thus speeding up the rest of the drying process. Once you’ve taken the faster-drying stuff out, then you can push the temperature all the way up to dry the heavier items like jeans and towels.Hit the tub.
-- Hand wash – though we try to avoid it, sometimes we are forced to do a little hand laundry on our gym shorts and shirts. The good news is that they air dry pretty quickly when we hang ‘em out and spread ‘em out over a drying rack in the tub. If you need your workout shirt and shorts for tomorrow, start by hand washing them tonight. After washing, take each item, lay them out on a towel and roll the item up in the towel. Then step on your towel tube (preferably in bare feet) and stamp out the extra water, and then unroll your tube. Hang up the items (as well as the towel) to dry overnight. If the items are still damp in the morning, then finish the job with a standard blow dryer.
Machine Washing 101
-- It being the back-to-school season, we started to feel a little nostalgic for those by-gone college-era laundry days, when we used to accidentally destroy our clothes by throwing all colors together in the wash and setting the water temperature to scald.
Had Wikihow.com existed back in our day we might have avoided most of our laundry-related mishaps. For step-by-step, virtually idiot-proof instructions on how to do your laundry, click to: http://www.wikihow.com/Do-Your-Laundry-in-a-Dorm.
