Laundry Love: Finding Joy in a Common Chore

by Patric Richardson

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!

nontoxic, biodegradable, allergen free, bleach free, petroleum free, phosphate free, and phthalate free.

to maintain your textiles’ white dye, wash your whites with a gentle soap and a tablespoon of chlorine-free oxygen bleach. This nontoxic, biodegradable bleach alternative, also known as sodium percarbonate, will whiten your clothes safely and beautifully. One caveat: Don’t use it for washing silks or woolens.

First, wash everything—and I do mean everything—on warm.

You’re going to wash everything on the express cycle, sometimes called the fast, quick, or super-speed cycle. Running for a total of roughly twenty-eight minutes, depending on your machine, the express cycle takes your clothes through an eight-minute wash and an eight-minute rinse (plus the rest and the spin)—plenty of time to get your clothes clean.

Select High Spin for each of your loads; you want your textiles to be as dry as possible to shorten their time spent in your dryer and on your drying racks.

Consider adding a dye-trapping laundry sheet to each wash. This handy small sheet helps soak up stains, any microbleeding, and hard-water minerals during the wash cycle. Best of all, you don’t need a full sheet. Simply rip a full one in half and toss half in.

If you have a load of really, really dirty clothes—for example, clothes you’ve worn hiking or gardening—add a quarter cup of washing soda, poured right on top of your clothes, to boost the cleaning power of the wash. The washing soda, or sodium carbonate (often sold in grocery stores—although it’s not food safe), softens the water, allowing the detergent both to remove dirt from your textiles and keep the soil in the water, rather than redepositing it on the clothes.

when your machine begins to smell, it’s time to get cleaning. Simply pour one pound of Borax directly into your empty washing machine; turn on your hottest, longest cycle; and then pour a gallon of white vinegar in your dispenser. Done! Periodically, I also scrub the dispenser drawer with a fifty-fifty mixture of vinegar and water. As for cleaning your dryer, once it’s cool, spray the inside with your fifty-fifty mixture of vinegar and water, and then wipe down with a clean, white terry washcloth.

I place a tightly rolled ball of aluminum foil in every dryer load to discharge any static from my laundry. Take a yard of aluminum foil and roll it into a ball, roughly the size of a baseball. Then just throw it into your dryer. It should last about sixty loads, getting increasingly smaller with each. Once it shrinks to the size of a golf ball, simply toss it into your recycling container and start over with a new ball of aluminum foil.

Simply pour vodka (cheap vodka works just as well as the fancy Belvedere) into a spray bottle and spritz on the article in question. The vodka kills any bacteria and removes all scents, including cigarette smoke and strong food odors. (This technique also works on carpets for pet smells and sanitizes cutting boards in the kitchen.)

In fact, closets weren’t for clothes storage at all, but instead were private, even secret spaces reserved for leisure time, including spiritual contemplation and art appreciation. For example, in the Bible, believers are advised to pray in their closets. And people today still talk about coming out of the closet when publically revealing a secret.

(Once a year, lightly rub cedar blocks with sandpaper to revive the cedar’s natural scent.)

A bottle of bleach alternative (100 percent sodium percarbonate); use one tablespoon sodium percarbonate to one quart of water (this solution lasts roughly an hour—then it off-gasses the extra oxygen molecule and the H2O2 becomes H2O, or plain water) 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 an oil-based 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 of cheap vodka (it’s for your laundry, I promise) Inexpensive, white terry washcloths (I buy stacks of them) Cotton makeup pads

The first time you wash it, spray the underarms with a mixture of vinegar and water right before you wash. Doing so will prevent underarm stains in the first place; then repeat this every time you wash.

However you like your berries, you can eliminate this organic stain by dipping the affected area in a solution of bleach alternative and water. Give it a swish and throw it in the wash.

Now, before washing, I recommend dipping the stained area (even a stain of menstrual blood) in a solution of bleach alternative and water.

sweat and body grease. Dip the stain into a solution of bleach alternative and the hottest possible water. Then launder.

Chili: Thanks to the tomato in chili, this is one tough stain to remove. Spray the stained area with vinegar and water. Then scrub with laundry soap and a brush. Once the stain is mostly out, spray it again with vinegar and water to ensure there’s no oil left, and wash as normal.

Always choose the thirty-minute washing cycle and the fast spin.

Place all of your dirty caps on the top rack of your dishwasher, allowing its various tines to hold them in place; wash them on their own with dishwashing soap during a quick-wash cycle. Then line-dry.

Boots (suede-sheepskin): These specialty boots (Uggs and the like) require handwashing. Begin by spraying them with an equal mixture of vinegar and water, and then gently scrub them with your laundry brush and laundry soap to remove any salt. Next, submerge the boots in a bucket, a laundry tub, or even a bathtub, to which you’ve added soap flakes or a liquid laundry soap. Don’t use detergent, as that can negatively affect the boots’ moisture-repellant treatment. Let them sit in the soapy water for about twenty minutes, rinse them clean with fresh water, and then lay them flat to dry on their sides so that any extra water runs out. Placing them in front of a fan is great, but in front of heat—no way (heat, too, can harm the moisture-repellant treatment). Be sure to fluff up the sheepskin interiors with your fingers.

For the jacket or sleeping bag, however, hang to dry—the heat of the dryer is too hot for the exterior fabric. And nope, the down won’t get musty if you air dry. Then, once the jacket or sleeping bag is completely dry, fluff it up by throwing it into the dryer with tennis balls on the no-heat, air-fluff setting.

Or maybe it’s cotton—then just throw it right into the washing machine. Use your best judgment based on your shower curtain’s fabric and simply wash accordingly. To clean a shower liner, wash it in your machine on its own with soap flakes or a safe, plant-based, liquid laundry soap and a tablespoon of bleach alternative to remove any scale and mildew.

the machine you purchase has three features that you can control: temperature, spin speed, and the number of minutes a wash runs.