How I Do My Laundry

A reader wrote in asking me to write about how I do my laundry, so here it is.

It's very simple.

First, I collect my clothes in the bedroom in a hamper made with cotton canvas on a wood frame that I got at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Then, when it is time to do a load of laundry, I sort the light colors from the dark colors and take them to the mud room, where the washing machine is. I have a Kenmore Laundry Center stacking unit that has a washing machine on the bottom and a "high efficiency" dryer on the top. It came with the house. It fits well in the little mud room just off the kitchen, so we will probably just continue to use it until it breaks down and needs to be replaced. At that time, we'll buy a washer and dryer that are energy- and water-efficient. Just a note about buying washing machines....often the new ones have an odor, so in the past we have usually purchased used appliances, and it's likely we will do so again when the time comes. By then, the new high-efficiency appliances will probably be available used.

We wash everything in warm water with various soap-based products. Over the years we have had the opportunity to purchase soap at bulk discounts and I have been given laundry products to try, and when we got our water softener (which we no longer use), it came with a lot of soap. So we have boxes and buckets of laundry products sitting in our garage, some of which no longer have labels because we transferred the soap from cardboard boxes into other containers. So I can't really tell you what brands I am using, but I can tell you it's natural and soap-based, not detergent.

Along with the soap, I use an oxygen-based bleach product called Oxy Magic. I used to use OxyClean, but they changed the formula and I find this one works better.

I don't use a fabric softener because I have only natural fibers, and fabric softeners are used to remove static cling from synthetic fabrics.

Mostly I don't need to use a spot remover, but I do often get oil spots on my shirts from dripping salad dressing. For this, the only thing I've found that works is Natural Solvent Spotter from Naturally Yours. For other spots, I look up the natural solutions in my book Home Safe Home.

I've found that the hardness of the water really affects how clean clothes can get, and the harder the water, the more the soap or detergent sticks to the clothes. We have very hard water here, so we got a salt-free water conditioner from Winston Kao at Go Beyond Organic. It is the same as the one on our chlorine-free swimming pool, but is attached to the pipe as the water comes into our house. It is a small pipe with a core made of precious and semi-precious metals which adds a very small charge of electricity to the water as it flows through. The minerals in the water become 400 times smaller, resulting in water that feels very soft and silky, without adding salt or other water softening chemicals. Since having this, we have found we need only half the amount of soap we were using before to do our laundry. We didn't get this specifically for laundry--it's part of our whole house filtration system--but the fact that it makes our clothes cleaner is an added benefit.

And finally, because I only wear natural fibers, I have a fair amount of ironing to do. I've learned over the years that if I take things out of the dryer immediately and hang them up right away, I often don't need to iron. The longer you let natural fibers sit crumpled up in a basket, the more they wrinkle and the more the wrinkles "set" in the fabric. So I try to hang my clothes up right away or do the ironing that needs to be done as soon as I can, to make ironing easier.

I have a full size ironing board with a cotton cover. None of those covers with no-stick finish or foam padding. If you can't find one of these at your local hardware store, type "cotton ironing board cover" in your favorite search engine and it will come up. I just found these instructions for How to Make a Tailor's Ironing Board. Apparently ordinary ironing board covers do not allow the steam from the iron to penetrate through the fabric well enough. These instructions use cotton and wool materials to make a professional ironing board that will help make ironing easier and better. I may try this.

Some years ago I purchased a top-of-the-line Rowenta iron. It was not inexpensive (around $80 at the time), but it was well worth it. It is much heavier than the less expensive brands, which actually makes it easier to iron (I don't have to press as hard with my arm). I've had no probelm with it and have been using it for at least twenty years. I originally bought it because the cheaper ones I was using kept breaking down. So this is a purchase I highly recommend if you are ironing a lot of natural fiber clothing.

That's about it. Oh, one more thing. All of the hangers in my closet are made of wood, not plastic. They last forever and don't break like the plastic ones do.

That's all about my laundry.