Laundry

[The13thMan]

[FONT=Century Gothic] [COLOR=DarkOrange]Whenever i do the laundry all of my black shirts always end up with tiny pieces of white lint all all over it. It's soooo annoying. My shirts also always fade and i hate it. So i was wondering how the heck are you supposed to do the laundry without fading out the shirts and getting that crappy black lint all over it? By the way i only have a washer, no dryer.

And uh, so this topic doesn't get locked, tell me some stories about your laundry experiences. I imagine there are plenty of college students out there that had to deal with laundry for the first time.

Later.
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[Delta]

[COLOR=#656446]If you absolutely have to pre-soak your clothes, don't let them stay in the wash water long. Also, don't wait for stains to dissolve; scrub them off immediately.

I had to do my laundry for nearly the whole month of April. First time, yeah? I could have just let them pile up and have the laundry girl worry about the various freakish stains I sampled why traipsing across fields, mountains and buffalo watering holes, but I can't afford her services (I would have to give up my addiction to the local lime soda, my sole link to sanity, just to pay for laundry). So every midnight, I'd be handwashing my clothes, scrubbing my delicate fingers raw while trying to get out the microenvironment of mud, grass juice and sea salt.

Being poor certainly ain't fun.[/COLOR]

[Retribution]

[size=1]No dryer, you say? That's strange. Usually colleges will have communal washers and dryers. In any event, fading is one of those inevitable things that happens eventually, but in day to day washing you shouldn't be experiencing drastic fading. You can somewhat stall the fading process by washing with cold water. If you wash with hot, to put it frankly, you're screwed. The only way I know of to dry clothes without a dryer would be to hanging them out to dry, so if that's not working, you may be out of luck.

I do my laundry with both a washer and dryer, and it seems to be alright. I wash white clothes in hot water and colored clothes in cold and I've only had one shirt that's faded.

By the way, how many loads do you have to do to wash all your laundry?[/size]

[Horendithas]

[COLOR=Sienna]I don?t know how to solve the white lint problem since usually running my shirts through a dryer gets rid of it, wait you get black lint too? Are you combining colors? If so perhaps keeping your whites and colors in separate wash loads might end that problem, if not, I don?t have an answer. But for the fading bit, try using cold water for the wash like Retribution mentioned. Another trick I learned from my mom is to use a cup of vinegar with dark clothes the first time you wash them. For what ever reason it helps to set the color and they fade less quickly over the years.

As for stories about laundry, I remember when I was a kid and the washer broke my mom had to use a laundry mat for a few days until the new washer arrived. It worked pretty well except for one time she put the basket on top of the car, got in and drove off. She didn?t notice until she got home and by the time she went back, most of the clothes had been either run over or blown away. Some of them we never found. [/COLOR]

[Valen]

To get rid of the white lint, you should make sure you're not washing anything white with your colors. The fading, however, make sure the wash temperature is warm and the rinse temperature is cold (or if you have delicate colors, just use cold/cold).

I remember a few months ago when I was doing laundry for a friend's mom while she was out of town and we had evacuated here for hurricane Rita (yeah, I go to my friend's house out in Raceland, a middle-of-nowhere town only 40 miles outside new orleans for Katrina, then come back for Rita, which still hit almost head-on back here in Metairie, only 2 miles from New Orleans lol it was lame!...anywho, back onm topic). It was Barra and myself in this house alone with tons of MREs and there was a lot of laundry to be done that would never get done, so we cleaned the house and I did laundry, so I came across a LARPer's cape. Double-sided, blue and black, very heavy material... didn't read the tag that said "dry clean only, do not machine wash." Needless to say, I machine washed it... it came out with white bloctches in the blue side, and no black side. >.>;

Since that day, I have been denied the honor of washing LARP clothes lol.

[Solo Tremaine]

[COLOR=#503F86]Make sure you take everything out of the pockets, too. I always find that if I don't take all the tissues out, I end up with a horrible crusty lump in my jeans pocket and annoying crumbly bits of (admittedly very clean) tissue paper stuck to every inch of all my clothes.

I've been pretty good with washing my clothes so far. Since I'm still at home I don't get to do it very often, but when both my parents were away I was in charge of everything in the house, which was actually pretty cool ^_^

I don't have any advice for the lint, though. You can buy lint rollers which you basically just roll or brush over the clothing and it all comes off. We have one but I've never used it. They look like big cotton reels with a maraca handle stuck on one end.[/COLOR]

[The13thMan]

[FONT=Century Gothic] [COLOR=DarkOrange]Cold for colors and warm for whites, gotcha.

No, i'm not in college, yet. I'm still at the parent's house and they're the ones without the dryer. We hang 'em to dry 'em which is really annoying, but oh well.

Thanx for the help. ^L^ Later.[/COLOR] [/FONT]