4. Same goes for the fourth load, which is an equally lovely lump of warm colors: reds, yellows, browns, and oranges. This pile, too, includes a wide variety of items—your yellow chiffon dress, your coral towels, your spouse’s khakis, your kid’s hot-pink tutu—all your warm textiles.
Personally, I only wash my warm-colored clothes once every two weeks. I own so few warm-colored clothes that I actually bought red plaid boxers just to help make a full pile. (TMI?)Anyway, if you don’t have enough textiles in one particular pile to garner a wash, skip that load this week. You have my permission. Or if you really need a particular garment washed this week but don’t have enough similarly colored items, just handwash it. (See all my handwashing how-tos in the next chapter.)
The reasons behind sorting the cool colors from the warm colors (no, you shouldn’t wash them together) are these: If a microdye bleed occurs in the wash of either of these loads, no one will even notice. But if you mix cool colors with warm colors, a micro blue bleed, for example, might dot a red button-down with purple or a yellow T-shirt with green. In addition, due to their greater amount of dye, cool-colored clothes tend to be heavier than warm-colored clothes, and that means lots of abrasion if mixed together in a wash load—for example, your blue jeans sloshing around in a wash will be hard on your orange polo shirt. Don’t do it. Your wash results won’t be nearly as wonderful, and your clothes will wear out much faster.
That said, it can be confusing to determine what goes in which pile when it comes to our multicolored, multipatterned clothing. For more on what to do in those instances, see the sidebar that follows this section.
5. Finally, if you own tech-driven, high-performance activewear, you need one more pile. Think polypropylene, spandex, and other such high-tech fabrics included in workout wear by such brands as Athleta, Lululemon, Nike, Under Armour, etc. Throw your polyfleece into this pile, too.
Why does athletic gear get its own pile? It’s because all of these activewear fabrics, in any color, are both hydrophobic and oleophilic. In other words, they hate water and love oil. That means they’re extra thirsty when it comes to soaking up sweat and body oils, hanging on to them tightly throughout a wash cycle, such that water does nothing to eliminate the oil. That’s why the more you work out in these clothes, the more they stink—whether or not you wash them. In addition, the sagging elastic in your swimwear hasn’t lost its give; it’s just bogged down by oil.
To get these clothes really clean and smelling good, you need a detergent that includes hydrogen peroxide, an enzyme that whisks away the oil. (I’ll also point out that there’s no law that says you have to work out in these clothes. Lounging around in them is perfectly acceptable.)
The Gray Area
* * *
A few years ago, I was back home in Kentucky, holding a Laundry Camp for my mom and a bunch of her friends, who were all complete aces at the whites-lights-darks method. But my new sorting approach was throwing them for a loop.
“Where does my pink top with the blue floral print go?”
“I’ve got gray slacks with red pinstripes. Which pile do they go into?”
“What about my yellow polka-dotted navy blouse?”
“And my Lilly Pulitzer dresses?!” (They’re Southern women, after all.)
No worries, I explained. Just choose the pile—cool colors or warm colors—that you think matches each item best. Still not sure? Look at the item from a bit of a distance and you’ll see which color speaks most loudly to you. Same goes for argyles and ikats, paisleys and plaids. Don’t stress about this—pick your pile and then get washing.
Well, Isn’t That Special?
While the sorting plan calls for four piles (or five if you own high-tech workout gear), sometimes a week will deliver an extra load of wash. Say your family takes a camping vacation. You return home and everyone is invited (ordered) to bring their dirty, stinky hiking gear to the laundry room for an immediate wash. Or maybe it’s a load of your child’s (again, smelly) basketball gear. Or perhaps your pile of cool-colored clothes includes a dozen jeans of all sizes, so you dedicate an entire wash to dungarees. It happens—laundry doesn’t follow strict rules all the time, and it’s OK to change things up when life demands it.
My favorite special load is the Thanksgiving dinner linens back home in Kentucky. After cleaning up the dishes and tucking the leftovers into our second refrigerator on the back porch, it’s time to do this bonus wash.
Prior to their washing, our vintage napkins, table runners, and tablecloths—some family heirlooms and some picked up at estate or rummage sales—could easily divulge, via their stains, what we enjoyed at our annual, colossal spread: the turkey, of course—a regal plumper baked to perfection and served with gravy—plus mashed potatoes, Louise’s sweet potatoes, Granny Jiles’s Sweet Potato Balls (recipe, page 170), corn, green beans, peas, brussels sprouts, cranberries (both relish and jelly), apple stack cake, red velvet cake, family friend Arlene’s Sour Cream Pound Cake (recipe, page 171), my mom’s Legendary Pumpkin Roll (recipe, page 172), and Maxine’s Punch (recipe, page 167). I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but just writing this list makes my mouth water.
Whatever your extra load is, it’s likely going to be personal. And don’t sweat it—as in life, we all have extra loads to carry now and then. Like my family’s Thanksgiving linens or your hiking clothes from that woodsy vacation, the extra load just may be a sign of a life well lived. Do what you need to do, get ’em clean, and move boldly forward.
Still with me? Good. Now that you’ve sorted, you’ll need to do one more thing before washing: Gather up any wool and silk items from your piles. For each silky item (actual silk or fabric that just feels like silk), turn it inside out and place it into a mesh bag, one item per bag if possible. If your mesh bag is too big for your item, fold the bag down smaller and fasten the mesh with two or three safety pins.
Wool items are treated a bit differently to avoid felting. Now, I can imagine that you’re concerned about washing wool. But don’t fret: Follow the instructions in this chapter on how to prep woolen items for washing, and the next chapter for the washing itself, and all your wool items will come out clean, smelling great, and the same size they were before washing. And as a bonus, you won’t go into shock over a dry cleaning bill.
Let’s take one of your wool sweaters as an example.
Perhaps you inadvertently throw that wool sweater into the wash. It swims around in the washing machine and rubs against itself and other clothes. While it doesn’t actually shrink, it does felt or matt like a dog’s fur or hair (think dreadlocks), and emerges smaller. Now perhaps you didn’t even realize that the sweater was in the wash and you throw it, along with the rest of that load, into the dryer. By the time your dryer dings, you’ve got a sweater only a toddler could wear.
This is what happens to wool if washed and dried like other clothes. We’re going to take a completely different approach that avoids abrasion, leverages a short wash cycle, and eliminates the dryer—and it all starts with a special way of preparing your wool garments during the sorting process.
First, fold your sweater, just like you’re going to be tucking it into a dresser drawer, then tightly roll it up, and place it into a mesh bag. If your mesh bag is too big for your sweater, like most of mine are, fold the bag snugly over the sweater and fasten the mesh securely with two or three safety pins. Each wool item should be stuffed as tightly as a giant sausage, with a mesh bag as its casing.
(Pro tip: Unless it’s the victim of a spill, a wool sweater only needs to be washed once or twice a season. If a sweater smells, just air it out. Washing it rarely will not only save water and energy, but your favorite sweaters will last much longer!)
Continue placing all of your wool and silk items into mesh bags, and then return each to the proper color pile (we’ll cover the washing part in the next chapter, but this is how to set yourself up for success during the sorting process).
Let’s review:
Gather up all of your textiles—clothes, sheets, towels, etc.
Sort all of your textiles into piles: whites, blacks, cool colors, warm colors, and activewear if needed.
Remove silky and wool items from each of these piles. Turn each silky item inside out, place each into its own mesh bag, and fasten with safety pins if needed. Ensure that each wool item is rolled up tightly, place each into its own mesh bag, and snugly secure each bag with safety pins.
Return silky and wool items to their original piles.
Now that all of your piles are prepared, let the washing begin!
3
It’ll All Come Out in the Wash
I feel that if I can do this, you know, if I can actually do my own laundry, there isn’t anything I can’t do.
—JENNIFER ANISTON AS RACHEL GREEN IN FRIENDS
You’ve likely washed countless loads of laundry in your lifetime. In Kentuckyspeak (and elsewhere, I’m certain), this isn’t your first rodeo. But perhaps you’re having a hard time imagining that a new approach to washing your clothes will reinvent your laundry experience. I can’t wait to introduce you to this fresh start—after all, laundry is really fun when you bring expertise and the right tools to the task.
Or perhaps doing laundry is mostly new to you. Maybe this book is a graduation present and you’re headed off to college or life out on your own. Well, kudos! It’s the perfect time to pick up these new skills.
As I mentioned before, I’ve been doing laundry since I was a wee lad, but as I matured, so did my skills—mostly through exploration and experimentation. Case in point: I didn’t figure out how to machine-wash wool items until roughly a decade ago. And while I knew laundering basics in childhood (thanks, Mom and Granny Dude), my knowledge got a renewed kick-start when I entered the University of Kentucky as a freshman, studying merchandising, apparel, and textiles.
Away from home for the first time, I discovered that dry cleaning my wool sweaters, wool pants, and even wool Bermuda shorts was an expensive endeavor. Who knew? Well, my parents, of course—they’d been footing the bill. But I’d been clueless, since previously I’d just tossed my wool clothes into our dry-cleaning bag and they’d magically reappear, freshly cleaned and pressed, a week later. So I was facing a quandary: On a college-student budget, how could I, a dry-clean-only clotheshorse, wear clean clothes and still afford to eat?
I got a hint of the answer when Professor Kim Spillman opened my eyes to fashion as a global enterprise. We were studying gorgeously embroidered, traditional woolen textiles like djellabas from North Africa at the time, and a question occurred to me: Dry cleaning was invented in the 1800s, so how did people clean their wool clothing prior to that? Did other cleaning methods exist? And if so, what were they?
Not long after, a teaching assistant and I were paging through a J.Crew catalog and I was complaining about some dry-clean-only clothes that I liked but couldn’t buy—I just couldn’t afford to dole out any more money on dry cleaning. She confirmed my earlier thought that I likely didn’t need to dry clean all my wool clothes, and she suggested that I approach another professor, Dr. Elizabeth Easter, with my question. Sure enough, Dr. Easter, an expert on textiles and their care, assured me I could handwash my woolens and then lay them flat to dry. She also noted that doing so was preferable for many articles of clothing, especially vintage and couture textiles.
Of course, handwashing wool makes perfect sense. After all, people didn’t dream up wool clothing only after the invention of dry cleaning. In Europe, they’ve been wearing Scottish kilts, British jumpers (or sweaters), and Norwegian bunads for centuries. In the Middle East, Tunisians wore chachias and Algerians donned gandoras; in Asia, Mongolians pulled on deels; and in South America, there were Colombian ponchos, Chilean chamantos, and Peruvian polleras. Eventually I learned archeologists had discovered woolen clothing remnants that were thousands of years old. The oldest woolen garment ever found? A three-thousand-year-old pair of Chinese pants.
And so, thanks to Dr. Easter’s advice, I was able to both wear clean woolens and support my thrice-daily habit of eating. Moreover, her counsel granted me a new freedom—to start exploring alternative ways to care for textiles.
Professor Ketch was important in this regard as well. She introduced me to haute couture, or high fashion, with a walk down the hall to the University of Kentucky’s Betty D. Eastin Historic Costume Collection. Included in this collection are several items once owned by Kentucky-born Mona Williams—better known as the Countess Mona von Bismarck, and the first American ever voted, way back in 1933, “the best-dressed woman in the world.” (I was so taken with her and her fashions, in fact, that years later I named my vintage clothing store Mona Williams in her honor.)
Among Bismarck’s special items were a 1964 cream wool suit; a 1966 apricot-and-silver lamé frock; and a 1967 drop-dead-gorgeous, beaded-and-sequined, black silk gazar dress with matching cape. All were created by Cristóbal Balenciaga, famed Spanish Basque fashion designer, for his muse, Bismarck. And we, as lucky UK students, learned how to care for them. Getting to see, and sometimes touch, this finery and understand how each item was constructed had a profound impact on me.
The methods I learned at UK and have honed over the years—while working for many high-end department stores, including Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom, and assisting countless customers—can be applied to all of our clothes. Whether I’m washing a cashmere cardigan or my Culture Club T-shirt, I give them both gentle care. After all, I want to ensure they both last as long as possible. Don’t your clothes deserve the same?
You’re already on your way: You know a smarter way to sort, plus you understand how to care for silk and wool items before placing them into your washing machine. Now it’s time to adopt new products and ways to launder.
Stinky Goats, Cashmere, and Your Washing Machine
When I introduce the idea of washing wool suits, cashmere scarves, mohair sweaters, and other such high-end items to my Laundry Campers, they’re shocked!
But then I remind them that these incredibly fine, soft fabrics are derived from the coats of farm (and wild) animals, which aren’t taking milk baths and eating bonbons all day.
Cashmere goats, for example, live mostly in the mountains of Asia. These goats are generally brown or gray (while some cashmere goats are somewhat white, only a precious few are entirely white—that’s why, if you own white cashmere, it’s likely been dyed), plus they’re dirty and muddy. Boy goats, known as bucks or billy goats, have the added characteristic of being incredibly smelly. (Their strong urine scent works like magic on girl goats.)
More important to our understanding of caring for the resulting luxe fabrics is the fact that goats and sheep aren’t rushed into barns at the first sign of inclement weather. Rain or snow? Bring it on.
Back when I worked at Neiman Marcus, a representative from Loro Piana, the preeminent cashmere brand, visited our store. She came all the way from Italy, because we were fortunate enough to have customers who had the desire and the ability to buy Loro Piana luxury sweaters, capes, scarves, and more—all items that included “dry-clean-only” tags. Yet during her presentation, she asked who among our team members washed their cashmere.
I was the only one who sheepishly (pun intended) raised my hand. “Now, that’s someone who knows how to care for cashmere,” she announced. Not only did she recommend washing, she noted that dry cleaning chemicals were far too harsh to use on cashmere. That’s also true for mohair. (So why the “dry-clean-only” tags then? Most manufacturers worry that consumers may inappropriately machine-wash a garment and damage it.)
In addition, you rarely have to wash these fabrics unless an item is actually dirty. Until then, just air out these articles of clothing. And if an item has picked up the smell of cigarette smoke or smells like your favorite Thai restaurant, just spritz it lightly with straight vodka and the smell will disappear (someone alert the billy goats!).
Now you, too, know how to take ca
re of these fabrics—it just helps to remember where they came from!
True Blue
You adore your brand-new jeans, but how can you maintain that deep gorgeous blue? Or maybe you want to keep the midnight black of your denim jacket? Or perhaps you want to prevent your light-wash jeans from fading even a jot more? Here’s a simple how-to: Add one-quarter cup of salt to a sink or large bowl filled with hot water. Then place your denim item into the basin and leave overnight. The next day, simply wash and dry as normal, and your denim should permanently hold its color. Easy!
Bursting Your Bubbles
In a later chapter you’ll learn how to treat stains immediately, prior to throwing your garments into the wash. But first, we need to turn our attention to soap. Yes, soap.
You’ve heard that old advice about not eating things whose ingredients you can’t spell, let alone pronounce. A similar rule applies to soap. The ingredient lists of most detergents are packed full of undecipherable, nearly impossible-to-spell chemicals—many of which are harmful to your clothes, your health, and the environment.
The toxicity of these chemicals hurts us daily in myriad ways, the least of which is by wearing out our clothes far more quickly than we’d like. One of the worst ways they harm us is with their fragrance: When we smell the “fresh scent” of detergents, fabric softeners, and laundry scent boosters (those beads you place in the wash), we’re actually breathing in volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are toxic chemicals that manufacturers, by law, need not reveal. If you look on ingredient lists, you’ll see that manufacturers take advantage of this and often only disclose categories of ingredients—e.g., perfume dispersant, perfume, and dye—not the actual ingredients themselves (any of which can be toxic).
Laundry Love Page 3
