5 Ways to Make Your Clothing Last Longer
Filed Under: Do It Yourself, Susatainable Living on October 11, 2009
There are a lot of ways that we can help the environment and be more frugal. One of those is how you think about your clothing. Many people buy, wear, toss, and buy again. It’s more common than we might think. Most of us normal people, of course, buy, wear, and then wash and wear again and again until the clothes start to look dingy and ratty. Then we give them to the thrift store or throw them out.
Well, there are a lot of ways that those clothes can be more useful, no matter their condition, before you send them to the garbage heap. There are also some good ways to keep your clothes in good shape longer. Here are five of the best ones we use in our house.
1. Wash in Warm or Cold Water and Less Often – Washing your clothes in warm (whites) or cold (colors) saves the color, fabric, etc. and keeps them better longer. Washing less often is also smart because it saves on the washing and the wear that washing causes. Most outer clothes, especially jeans and pants, can be worn twice before needing laundering.
I’m not advocating this, but when I was single (which is another way of saying “poor,” “cheap,” or “had better things to spend quarters on than laundry”), I would wear my dirty clothes into the shower every night and wash them while I washed myself. Really. Then I’d hang dry them and go to bed. Thinking back, this was kind of smart, but I spent a lot more time in the shower than I would have otherwise and it probably wasn’t much easier on my clothes than the laundry would have been. Oh well, at the time it was innovative and it saved me a lot of quarters every week. Which I promptly wasted on soda pop and video games, of course.
Try to wipe down your jackets and coats periodically with a wet rag and hang dry and they’ll probably go all season without needing to go into the machine. Then wash and hang dry before storage for the off-season.
2. Use Less Detergent and Vinegar Instead of Bleach – Use less detergent when you wash or nix the detergent altogether and just go with a good laundry soap. In our house, for instance, we use OxyClean almost exclusively and use a direct stain bar (bar of soap for laundry you can get in most stores) directly on stains before soaking and then washing. This is much easier on the fabrics and it saves a lot of soap going down the drain. With Oxy, you only need a little to do a lot of laundry.
When you need to bleach your whites, try using vinegar (white, not apple cider) instead of bleach. It’s easier on the clothes and much easier on the environment. It’s also less abrasive to your skin. It costs about the same per gallon, so you lose nothing by switching. Special note: if you use vinegar or bleach, DO NOT USE OXYCLEAN in the same load. They will react and cause stitching and thin fabrics to weaken. One or the other, even if you keep using detergent, is good enough anyway. Both is overkill.
3. Sew Up Tears and Keep Your Buttons – As soon as you notice a tear or a hole, fix it. Don’t wash it first, fix it first. The agitation of the washing could make the tear worse and the sooner you fix the problem, the better off you’ll be in terms of how it looks and how bad it gets.
If your clothing came with extra buttons or if you are throwing out a piece of clothing that has buttons or snaps, take them off and save them. You might remember your mom having a “button jar” somewhere in which she kept a huge array of spare buttons. Revive that tradition. These buttons come in hand for repairs on similar items (you’ll be surprised at how often you find a match) and are great for all kinds of fun crafts too.
4. Cut the Tags and Zip the Zippers – If you remove the tags (store tags or the tabs sewn in the collar or seam), cut them instead of tearing. Tearing can leave weak spots or even pull threads on your otherwise brand-new clothing. This makes it break down quicker.
Use scissors to cut through the tags or remove the tab close to the root without getting to the fabric. This will save you a lot of headaches later.
Finally, to keep zippers intact and help with zipper fatigue issues, zip up jackets, shirts, etc. that have zippers (even pants, if you think it will help) before washing. This helps keep them from getting clogged up with junk or loosening from movement in the machine. It also helps in the tumble dry to keep down the “tick tick tick” sound from the zipper flopping around.
5. Air Dry or Tumble on Low – Try to air dry everything. Here in our house, we have a couple of drying racks (you can find these in thrift stores for just a couple of bucks or make one easily) as well as an old shower rod hanging near the laundry that now acts as a hanging spot for clothing on coat hangers. Your house likely has a large assortment of hangers from purchases, leftovers, or whatever. These seem to be something that everyone has a lot of. So put them to use!
To avoid the “hanger seam” from the wire or thin plastic coat hangers, double or triple them up in the clothing. You can also use clothes pins as “separators” between two hangers to push them apart and make a wider hanger for shirts and such. Unzip items with zippers before hanging to dry, as this helps them dry faster.
If you must use a dryer, put it on low and run only a few items at a time. If you’re drying heavy items like jeans or jackets, put in a dry towel to help speed up the process. Make sure the lint trap is cleaned thoroughly and after every load and take the vent off the back of the dryer and clean it out regularly – two or three times a year is best, depending on usage. Not only is that lint a fire hazard, but it really restricts air flow and thus kills the efficiency of the machine.
Hopefully these hints will help you be more eco-friendly and save some money on your laundry and clothing care. When clothes are finally done for and need to be tossed, make sure they’re usable before you donate them to a goodwill. Clothes that are too ratty or are faded won’t sell well and the thrift store will likely just sell them as rags or throw them into the dumpster.
In our house, we donate some clothing to neighborhood people who need them. We also drop them off anonymously at the local women’s shelter and rehab, at the homeless shelter, etc. Most of our clothes, though, become useful without ever leaving our hands.
Once buttons and maybe zippers are removed, we will pile them up until there’s enough to bother with. Then I run sharp scizzors over them and cut them into useful rags and drop them in a box. These get used to sop up messes, line litter boxes, get sewn into doggy chew toys, make interesting patchwork blankets and quilts, and more. The pure cotton items can become biodegradable planter box liners, seed sprouters, and so forth.
Not to mention ratty clothing that still fits and “covers” is awesome for working clothes when you’re doing those Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs and really don’t want to ruin something decent. When painting our house this fall, for instance, I wore old shorts I’d dubbed “Tarzan shorts” (on account of the rips and tears), an old t-shirt, etc. and when I was done (and they were covered in paint), I just threw them out. Saved a lot of hassle trying to clean up something that would have just gunked up the laundry anyway.
Happy saving!
Related posts:
- My 3 Favorite Summer Money-Saving Tips
- How to Use Less Water and Be Eco-Friendly Washing the Car
- 3 Ways To Make Your Holidays Green While Saving Some Too
