Clothing
...brassieres, handkerchiefs, shoelaces, wrist and headbands, and kitchen washcloths and dish towels. Next look for all the bath towels, hand towels, and washcloths that are not white and place them in a separate group. Any jeans—light- or dark-colored (it doesn’t matter)—and any jean-like materialed clothes gets their own pile as well. However if you have a new pair of 501’s that haven’t been preshrunk, you’ll have to wash them all by themselves because the indigo dyes will bleed profusely all over the other clothes. But here is where my mother and I diverge in our sorting styles. The remaining clothes are generally going to be delicates, vulnerable to color blending, turgid washer agitators, and dryer heat. Things like shirts, blouses, slacks, nightgowns must carefully be divided along color lines. First, segregate according to dark colors: blues, deep purples, reds, blacks, browns, hunter greens—anything you think has the potential (or God forbid a reputation) of staining another article of your precious wardrobe. Further separate the reds and purples because these colors in the spectrum are never satisfied with themselves, always preying upon weaker, more feeble colors. Don’t assume that whatever you have left over will be one neat pile unto itself. Look for anything that is close to white, off-white, or pale, and make a pile for them. Next find the in-betweens. These are the tans, light blues; pinks are acceptable. Pastels should be in this load as well. If you run across something that has multiple colors, decide what its dominant color is and put it either with the darks or the lights. This whole process should take you about ten minutes and leave you with about seven to eight loads of laundry to start washing. For college students on a strict budget, it is really tempting to divide their laundry into two piles: load one and load two, throwing caution to the wind by ignoring all conventional wisdom about the need to sort clothing by color and fiber. But I cannot accept their economic pleas that the number of loads they can wash is proportionally predetermined by the quantity of quarters they must keep on hand. Plan ahead; you know when laundry day is at hand. Even if you have to sacrifice those two precious Snickers bars for lunch, save your quarters. And while I know it is politically correct to conserve as much water as possible by washing as few loads as possible, I insist on being as politically incorrect as possible—at least when it comes to laundry. I say wash as many loads as possible. The washer-dryer stage is where the uninitiated dilettante can, quite bluntly, goof-up. Most people think the order of the loads doesn’t matter too much when it comes to washing and drying. While this belief is wholeheartedly true if you wash your clothes under the auspices of a laundromat, I’m thinking of those college students who are fortunate enough to be living at home still, or who at least have limited laundry facilities on their premises. The white load always must be laundered last for two simple reasons: sloppiness and laziness. First this is the load that, under no uncertain circumstances, must be bathed in bleach. If by your misguided fortune you happen to carelessly dribble or unknowingly splash bleach on the shelf or interior sides of the basin that don’t get hit with water, you most certainly will drag the next load over the un-evaporated puddle of bleach and irreversibly ruin that pair of $78 Calvin Klein indigo jeans you didn’t intend to perform tie-dye miracles upon. Second, you want the white load to be last because after five to six hours of laundry duty, you’re going to be exhausted, and the last thing you want to do is have to fold that last load of clothes before you relieve yourself of your watch. Usually it is safe to leave this load in the dryer until you absolutely need a pair of socks or until you are down to your last pair of jockey shorts because it simply doesn’t matter whether these clothes get wrinkled. And if you do have that one blouse that doesn’t say "permanent press," then of course, you will be obliged to dutifully fold, iron, and properly hang it in your closet. Towels can be saved until second to last because they don’t need immediate attention either. Normally your guests won’t be able to discern any wrinkles anyway. If the towels sit in the dryer overnight and you are really picky about small wrinkles, you can always fluff them up. Jeans also don’t wrinkle (very much), so it is fairly safe to leave them until towards the end as well. The order I really recommend is to wash the delicates first. The order of the colors is not too crucial, but the reason you want to work with these loads first is that once they are out of the dryer, you will have your hands full with ironing since these piles contain the shirts and blouses and slacks and skirts. Once you have cycled through these three or four loads, then move on to the jeans, towels, and whites respectively. People always seem to have a different method of loading the washer, and I have to confess that my mother taught me the wrong way. Before my sister-in-law married into the family, I had no clue to the damage to which I was subjecting my clothes. Never put the clothes in first. That’s a cardinal sin among the serious laundry practitioners. Instead chose the water temperature before adding any detergent. Use cold water for anything that has even the slightest chance of shrinking. Warm is okay for any clothes that you are sure you’ve shrunk as far as they can go. These are the only two temperatures you really need because the detergent is the real key. Hot water should be used only on the white-colored clothes because the heat will work in concert with the bleach and whiten your underwear every time, whether anyone sees it or you figure in our mothers’ proverbial highway accident. After setting the temperature, spin the dial to the appropriate time setting. The dial usually is self-explanatory for the various loads you have pre-sorted. For...