Laundry Love

by Patric Richardson

  Even when I was an adult, she loved treating me. Once, we were browsing in a Brooks Brothers store, and I couldn’t decide which color gingham shirt to buy. Navy? Teal? Purple? Granny Dude announced that she’d solved the quandary: We’d get all six colors, and we did. She wasn’t reckless with her money in general—only extravagant with regard to spoiling me.

  * * *

  I completely adored Granny Dude, and I know she felt the same about me. As an adult, I moved home for a year when my mom and Granny Dude were living together—I feel lucky to have had that time with her.

  Getting Started

  Step one in your journey to keep your clothes from bossing you around is to be prepared. To begin transforming your laundry routine—and your textiles—you’ll need to gather the supplies listed below. I know it’s a long list, but don’t worry: we’ll break it down and cover everything in greater detail in later chapters. And I’ll explain and make a case for each item as we go along. Most of these items will last for at least a year, if not much longer, and many cost just a few bucks.

  Supplies you will need:

    Soap flakes or a high-quality, plant-based liquid laundry soap that’s free of petroleum, phosphate, phthalates, and parabens (if it contains any p words other than “Patric” or “plant,” it’s a no-go—and it also shouldn’t have partificial, ahem, artificial colors)

    A bottle of bleach alternative (100 percent sodium percarbonate); when you’re ready to use it, combine one tablespoon sodium percarbonate with one quart of water (this solution lasts roughly an hour—then it off-gases the extra oxygen molecule and the H2O2 becomes H2O, or plain water)

    A box of washing soda (100 percent sodium carbonate)

    A small laundry brush (my favorite features horsehair)

    A laundry soap bar (used with the laundry brush for spot-cleaning and found at most grocery stores), such as Fels-Naptha

    A spray bottle that you’ve filled with 50 percent white vinegar and 50 percent water

    A store-bought bottle of 70 percent rubbing alcohol (isopropyl alcohol)

    A bottle of concentrated, oil-soap stain solution, such as The Laundress Stain Solution

    A small bottle of Amodex—magical, nontoxic stuff recommended even by permanent-ink manufacturers

    A small spray bottle filled with cheap vodka (it’s for your laundry, I promise)

    Laundry mesh bags in multiple sizes—but mostly small (get these online or from any big-box store)

    Inexpensive, white terry washcloths (I buy stacks of them)

    Cotton makeup pads

    A few safety pins (I use colorful diaper pins for a bit of whimsy)

    A new tube of tennis balls

    A yard of aluminum foil

  For even more amazing laundry results and an extra dose of fun, consider adding these:

    A small bottle or two of essential oils (peppermint and cinnamon are two of my favorites)

    Dye-trapping laundry sheets (I love these so much, and I am not paid to say so), such as Shout Color Catchers

    Three or more wool balls (sheep, llama, or alpaca wool—take your pick)

    A couple of bumpy rubber dryer balls (like the cute hedgehog ones)

    A drying rack

    Some tunes to groove to

    A disco ball hanging overhead (optional, but I think every laundry room needs one)

  Supplies you don’t need:

    Any popular detergent that comes in giant, multigallon bottles. Loaded with petrochemicals, this stuff is bad for your clothes, bad for your skin, and bad for the environment. Even “baby” and “free clear” laundry detergent has animal-based ingredients, plus chemicals such as sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate, lauryl alcohol exothylate, sodium silicate, sodium xylenesulfonate, and stilbene disulfonic acid triazine derivative.

    Any popular detergent’s colorful pods. They’ve got the chemicals mentioned above, but now they’re in concentrated form. There’s enough detergent in one pod to wash five loads of clothes—five loads! That means that many of these chemicals aren’t washing away in the water but staying in your clothes. Plus, so many of these pods gunk up the sensors in washing machines that some Laundromats won’t allow you to use them. They’re also linked to allergies and skin rashes, and they’re attractive dangers to candy-loving kids and adults with dementia. Have you seen the commercials, made by pod manufacturers themselves, devoted to educating people about keeping these pods out of reach from those who may not know better? I rest my case.

    More than two laundry baskets. I don’t even use one. I toss my dirty clothes into a clothes hamper, which I keep in my laundry room/master bathroom located just off my bedroom. Then, when I’m ready to wash, I simply throw the clothes into the machine. I find that I’m more likely to fold my clothes immediately if I don’t have a laundry basket. (If yours has become more of a storage box for clean—or dirty—clothes rather than a container that transports clothes from bedroom to laundry room or Laundromat and back, you, too, may want to forgo laundry baskets.) That said, if your laundry room is more than a few steps away from your bedroom, investing in one or two easy-to-carry (and good-looking) laundry baskets or bags is perfectly acceptable.

    Fabric softener and dryer sheets. Don’t even get me started on these two. (For seven reasons why you should never use either of these again, jump ahead to page 50.)

    Chlorine bleach and chlorine bleach pens. Do you know that most hospitals don’t even use bleach for cleaning and disinfection anymore, and that the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t recommend bleach, even for black mold removal? Bleach irritates your eyes, nose, skin, and throat; damages equipment; and harms the environment. Enough said.

    Stain-removing sprays. These all-in-one options promise you stain-free textiles. But they often don’t work. Why? Because specific ingredients remove specific stains. In other words, the elements that remove an organic oily stain, for example, will not remove an inorganic nonoily stain. Later in the book, I’ll detail the three basic types of stains and how to remove all of them. Yes, really. Even the ones baked on in your dryer.

  Let’s Not Be Rash

  * * *

  Friends of mine (and Laundry Camp grads) were staying at a rented home on holiday and the entire family awoke the first morning covered by what appeared to be bedbug bites. They checked the mattresses, but no critters were found. However, an online search and quick visit to the laundry room revealed the likely culprit: detergent pods. Sure enough, their rashes matched the images they’d found online. So they stripped the beds and washed all the sheets and towels in warm water and baking soda—twice—and they alerted the homeowners to prevent this from happening to other guests. The lesson here: Washing your textiles with soap flakes or a safe, plant-based liquid laundry soap is not only good for your clothes, it is gentle on your skin.

  OK, let’s summarize:

    Now that you know to stop letting your clothes tell you what to do, your laundry routine is about to become simpler, faster, cheaper, and more fun!

    Your new, gentler laundry supplies will be kinder to your skin, your clothes, and the environment.

    You and your loved ones are going to be treated to softer and cleaner clothes, towels, bedding, and more.

    You’ll be able to show love to the ones you love through the simple act of laundry.

  Now that we’ve covered the key goals and basic supplies, it’s time to sort!

  2

  It’s Time to Sort It All Out

  We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or sorting the laundry.

  —E. B. WHITE, AUTHOR

  You know those funny posts featuring matchy-matchy family photos? Everyone is dressed identically, in T-shirts or tuxes, costumes or camouflage, even Star Trek uniforms.

  That was not my family. Look at any Richards
on family photo and it’s a visual Crayola box: We’re dressed in scarlet, goldenrod, shamrock, thistle. My family loves color. Especially my mom, who is at her happiest dressed in riotous shades. She stands out beautifully in any room. (I’m so proud of her: When I was in high school, Mom returned to college and reinvented herself. Strong and resilient in every way, she is the ultimate hostess and the queen of graciousness.)

  I’ve always loved color, too. So I’ve never minded sorting clothes. I remember being a kid, kneeling on the floor, throwing item after item on the growing mounds of sorted colors that surrounded me.

  While some families spent their weekends hiking the Appalachian Trail or watching their little soccer stars, my family shopped. At least Mom and I did. Dad, not so much, and the shopping gene skipped my brother. But Mom would even let me play hooky from time to time for special buying trips. In fact, for many years on my birthday, Mom, Granny Dude, and I would head north for a daylong shopping adventure at Lazarus department store in Columbus, Ohio. And all that shopping added up to a lot of colorful clothes.

  The only problem? Washing clothes wasn’t an everyday chore at my house. Today we don’t think twice about throwing in a load of clothes anytime, any day of the week. Six a.m. before the kids wake up. Or at midnight when we want to watch the end of Breakfast at Tiffany’s one more time.

  But back then, people generally stuck to one major chore each day. Like the old nursery rhyme said: Wash on Monday. Iron on Tuesday. Mend on Wednesday. Churn on Thursday.1 Clean on Friday. Bake on Saturday. Rest on Sunday. The idea of washing on Monday gave you lots of time to get everything dried, pressed, mended, etc. before the all-important Sunday church service at which you needed to look your best.

  Even further back in time, for hundreds of years in Europe and maybe elsewhere, washing clothes once a month, or even less frequently, was often a sign of wealth—proving you had so many clothes and linens that you didn’t need to launder more often than that. (Wealthy royals were even known to send their clothes off to professional launderers in Belgium.) In the meantime, people aired out clothes that had been worn but weren’t actually dirty—a time-saving and Earth-friendly practice we should all consider taking up again.

  But I digress. As a kid, washing once a week didn’t help me when I wanted to wear my favorite duds more often. So I sometimes appealed to Granny Dude, who was only too happy to launder the clothes of her darling grandson. Eventually, I asked her to teach me how to wash my own clothes, which meant I could wear my current faves whenever I liked.

  Mom made a deal with me: I could wash my clothes any day of the week, but I had to make it a full load, not just throw in the couple of items I wanted clean. That sounded fair. But before I could do that, I needed to learn how to sort. So Mom taught me the drill on sorting: whites, lights, and darks. Chances are you were taught to sort that way as well. And that advice served most of us pretty well in the decades leading up to the 1980s. But that wisdom has been flat wrong for forty years now!

  How the Whites-Lights-Darks Sorting Method Became a Thing

  We think laundry takes oodles of time today. But it’s nothing compared to washing back in the day (especially once you adopt my methods). And I’m not even talking about pounding dirty clothes on rocks in a stream or scrubbing them with a bar of soap on a wooden washboard—which, as you can likely guess, is extremely hard on clothes. Instead, I’m referring to using a wringer washer, that groundbreaking invention from the mid-1800s that was electrified at the turn of the last century.

  Wringer washers provided one of the old-fashioned washing methods that help explain whites-lights-darks sorting—clothes needed to be separated when dyes bled more easily before advances in textile technology. Granny Martha, on my dad’s side, used just such a machine until it stopped working and she could no longer replace it. As a kid, I used to watch her launder all of her and Grandpa’s clothes through the following steps:

  First, Granny Martha would fill her open-topped wringer washer about half-full with ten or so gallons of hot water. Then she’d add her detergent, likely Dash or Fab, and turn on the agitator. This rocket-shaped machine part, complete with fins and located at the washer’s center, quickly turned clockwise and then counterclockwise, moving the clothes around in the soapy water. (Want to see a video? There are lots online.)

  Next, she’d place all the white clothes into the washer—that’s because the water was at its cleanest at the start, with no dirt and no dye. As each item became clean, she’d remove it from the washer, carefully and manually crank it through the attached wringer to remove the soapy water, and then place it in a dedicated laundry basket—one each for whites, lights, and darks. (This, by the way, is where we get the expression “to be put through the wringer,” which refers to suffering from something terrible.)

  Granny Martha would then repeat this sluggish and laborious process next with the lights and, finally, with the darks—again, one item at a time. Meanwhile, the water would become increasingly dirty and dyed (from yesteryear’s less-colorfast pigments).

  Once all the clothes had been washed and wrung out in that order—whites, lights, and darks—she’d pump out the now dirty water and replace it with clean water for rinsing.

  Then she’d start all over, this time with washed white clothes, rinsing and then wringing each item again, one at a time, until it was as dry as possible. These clothes were still wet and heavy, however—not nearly as dry as those that come out of our modern washing machines that boast fast spin cycles.

  Just prior to hanging up the whites to dry on her clothesline, Granny Martha would dump the lights into the tub for rinsing. Then, after hanging up the whites, she’d return to the washer to ring out the lights and then hang them up as the darks rinsed. Finally, she’d wring out the darks and hang them up to dry.

  Lastly, a few hours later, she’d return to the clothesline to take them all down, fold the items as she unclipped them, and then carry the clothesbaskets back into the house.

  Land’s sake—what a lot of physical work! No wonder our grandmas and great-grandmas only performed this half-day chore once a week. Otherwise they’d be doing laundry till the cows came home.

  We can see from this step-by-step method why there’s no reason to sort our clothes the whites-lights-darks way any longer, as our modern machines don’t reuse the same wash or rinse water over and over again. Lucky for us, we can wash our clothes in any order we please.

  It was around the 1980s that manufacturers began outfitting washing machines with some pretty impressive technology that enabled us to wash larger loads at a quicker pace. In addition, dyes were becoming much more fast—colorfastness means that dye is resistant to fading or changing, thus making red-sock syndrome nearly a thing of the past.

  Yet we were still following the old rules. No one, not even the manufacturers, taught us differently, so we continued sorting our clothes just like our parents and grandparents did back in the day, into whites, lights, and darks.

  Until now. I’m here to teach you a faster, better way to sort, which will lead to a faster, better way to wash (we’ll cover that in the next chapter). To avoid spending more time on laundry than needed, it all begins with sorting my way (cue Frank Sinatra).

  By the end of this quick process, you’ll have four (or possibly five) piles of textiles.

  I know, I know: You’re saying, “What do you mean four piles?! You just promised to make doing laundry smarter, easier, faster. But now we’ve got more piles?”

  Yep. It’s kind of like that old adage, “You don’t get anything clean without getting something else dirty.” Only in this case, you’re going to get everything clean—with amazing results and in far less time. And, after all, few people only wash a white load, a light load, and a dark load every week. It’s more likely they’re doing all those, plus running separate loads of towels and lingerie and bedding. In fact—according to myriad sources, including The Spruce—the average American family does eight to ten loads of laundry per week
. (Not to mention all the clothes they take to the dry cleaner.) Well, all that ends now.

  First, walk through your house and gather up all your textiles—kitchen towels, bed linens, bath towels and rugs, throws and blankets, really anything that needs washing, plus everything from your laundry hampers. Then choose a spot in your house where you have lots of room to create piles. (For this step, it helps to have your laundry mesh bags and a few safety pins handy.)

  Now let’s get sorting:

  1.   Toss all your whites into one pile. We’re talking white button-down shirts, white bras, white socks, white sheets, white towels, white elephants, etc. They all get thrown into this pile. So do all of your mostly white items with a bit of color—say, your white blouse with blue polka dots and your white pants with skinny black stripes. You’ll also throw into this pile all your whiter-shade-of-pale clothes: off-white, cream, oatmeal, and beige. Finally, if you have any items of the lightest lemon yellow, they belong in this pile, too.

  2.   Next, make a pile of all your black clothes. After all, we’re living in the twenty-first century and we love our black clothes. Toss your black satin sheets into this pile, too—at least I do.

  3.   Colorfastness in textiles today allows us to change up our loads. For example, we no longer need to worry about purple dye leaking onto a blue shirt. So, the third pile is a pretty one made up of cool colors: blues, greens, and purples. Grays go into this pile, too. Again, we’re talking your favorite blue jeans, your lacy purple bra, your green floral towels, your kid’s navy pirate sheets—all your cool textiles.