With the cooler weather, this week seemed like a good time for hand-washing my sweaters. This morning, the sun was pouring into the kitchen, adding a bit of warmth to that end of the house for an hour or two. I have a drying rack set up near this large window -- perfect spot to dry some of our laundry.
After finishing some kitchen chores, I grabbed the dirty sweater bin from the floor of my closet and brought the load to the bathroom adjacent to the kitchen. Two at a time, I washed the lot in the bathroom sink, gently pressed water out of each sweater over the sink, removed additional water by rolling each in a large bath towel, then gently hung to dry on the rack.
I go through 1 towel for every 3 sweaters before the towel is simply too wet to remove any additional water. I lay the towel out on the top of the dryer, carefully laying the wet sweater out on the towel, fold the arms of the sweater in, fold the edges of the towel in over the sweater's sides, then roll the bundle up. Rolling sweaters up in a towel is a good way to press the water out without stretching or twisting the sweater. Hand-washing sweaters and coloring hair are some of the best uses for those very ragged bath towels.
I don't use any sort of fancy detergent like Woolite, just the cheap liquid hand dishwashing detergent from Dollar Tree. I choose a liquid detergent that has the least amount of color, in case the soap were to deposit any of its color onto my garments. I also guard the color of my sweaters by washing like colors together, as 2 sweaters will fit in my sink at a time. Despite using cheap liquid dish soap and washing by hand, my sweaters wash and dry nicely, offering no indication that I go the cheap route.
To speed up the drying process, and prevent mildewy odors, I set up a box fan on the floor near the drying rack. Doing so seems to cut the drying time by about one-third.
I don't wear many wool sweaters, but I do wear (and hand-wash) cashmere, silk, and cotton sweaters. Of course, my sweater-washing bravery (even with my "good" sweaters) may be due to the fact that almost all of my sweaters have come from second-hand stores, paying from 99 cents to $4 each.
In my mother's time, sweaters were brought to the dry cleaner once or twice per season. I'm not even sure where our nearest dry cleaner is for my area, as I haven't had anything professionally-cleaned in over 20 years. I'll continue washing my sweaters by hand, saving some money, and keeping those icky chemicals out of my breathing space.
