Half of the excitement when buying a new item of clothing comes from the feel of fresh fabric on our skin. In order to prolong that luxurious feeling you need to take care of your clothes in a proper manner. Here are 5 clothing tips and tricks that will help you enjoy your clothing much longer.
Honour the label
Every piece of clothing comes with a label attached which should be the holy book on how to take care of that particular item. If it says to wash it on low temperature, it probably means that it will be ruined while washed on high. However, some items are labeled as dry clean only, mostly jackets and sweaters. Since dry cleaning has a huge environmental impact you should know that this labeling is the only one which should probably not be so strictly obeyed. Hand washing in cold water is a great alternative to dry cleaning, among many others such as professional wet cleaning and steam cleaning.
Separate by colour
If you want to keep your brights bright and your tighty whities white and tight you should not mix them in your washing machine. Everyone’s probably had that one red sock sneak its way into the load of white laundry and have the entire load end up that awful salmon shade of pink. The smartest thing to do is to wash similar colours together. If you think that some item’s colour will bleed onto others, wash it separately, preferably by hand. You can check the quality of the dye by taking a wet cotton ball and rubbing the fabric for a couple of seconds – if there’s some colour transfer on the cotton ball the chances are it will bleed. Also, don’t rely on colour catchers since they don’t work sometimes and you don’t really want to gamble on the entire load of clothing.
Hand wash your delicate items
Although many washing machines and dryers come with a setting for delicate laundry, it would be best if you were to wash it by hand. Dryers should be avoided completely if you want your delicates to last you a long time. Shortly put, hand wash your lingerie with cold water and hang them to dry. If you really don’t have time to wash by hand, you should put them in a special baggie for delicate clothing which is said to protect them from damage.
Reduce the use of iron
There isn’t a person on earth who loves to iron their clothing so this tip will probably be adored by many. Repeated ironing can thin out the fabric and destroy the clothes, so you shouldn’t iron if not completely necessary. There’s a great hack if you really hate ironing – just hang up your clothes somewhere in the bathroom while you’re taking a hot shower. Be careful not to get the garment wet, just nicely steamed. The clothes will not be perfect as if they were carefully ironed, but you will notice that the wrinkles have drastically reduced.
Store your clothes properly
It should go without saying – your clothes are not being taken care of if you keep them in (un)organized piles on your bedroom’s floor no matter how hard you want to convince yourself otherwise. The hard truth is that some clothes should be hung in a dark and dry place and others should be neatly folded. How to know which is which? Well, you should hang those items which wrinkle easily such as clothes made of linen, skirts or suits. On the other hand, those pieces which can be stretched out will look their best if folded. These include T-shirts, knitted sweaters and trousers made out of stretchy materials.
