My husband and I have a reputation for wearing clothes until they fall apart. Witness that in my earlier blog, New Uses for Old Jeans. Just the other month, I had to leave a note on one of his t-shirts that said “Please release me, let me go.” The shirt was so bad that I left the note sticking out from inside a hole in the front.
There are some ways to ensure that your clothes last as long as possible. If you care for your clothes well, you can stretch their useable life quite a bit.
The biggest thing that we do to wear our our clothes is to put them in the dryer. Even on low heat, dyers wreck havoc on fabric. Most of the time you find a hole in a sock it isn’t after a day of wearing it but as you are folding it warm from the dryer. You know all of that lint that you clean from the dryer filter? It used to be fibers in your clothing. Think of how many bags of lint your clothes lose in a year.
Our old dryer was particularly vicious. It massacred one particular sock so well that we’ve save it as a souvenir, or a reminder to replace inefficient or potentially lethal appliances. Hang your clothes, and you will save them to clothe you another day.
The second biggest thing we do to wear out our clothes is…you guessed it…wash them. Every wash leeches color and fibers from your clothing. There is not much you can do to get around this one, unless you want to alienate everyone around you with smell. You can wash them in cold water. You can wash them on the gentle cycle with gentle detergent or you can wear them more than once before washing.
I’ve never been good at the wear it more than once strategy. I find that men are a little more open to this method. In our house, the females and the baby wear things once before a wash, while the males do the smell test. I won’t go into detail on exactly what the smell test is. Chances are you either do it yourself or have seen it done in your household.
Do you do the smell test? What are your favorite ways to make your clothes last longer?
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