Laundry Frustrations

[ArtsyMomma]

I am so irked about our clothing lately. I think I'm doing a poor job washing the laundry, and I could really use some advice.

Everything fades, a lot. Some clothes get tiny holes in them. Some stuff has grease/oil stains. It's very frustrating.

I know we have hard very water, other than that I'm at a loss. I use the dryer, should I be hanging clothes to dry?

Right now my laundry detergent is Sun and Earth - but I'll need to buy more soon.

Oh, and stains...we have so many stains. I've 'bleached' things using oxyclean (I think....). Some items have these odd severely faded areas....

S.O.C.!!! Save Our Clothes!!! Help me figure out how to do this the right way, before I ruin everything!

[MissMommyNiceNice]

I would try adding some borax to boost the cleansing power of your laundry soap & soften your water. I personally don't care for sun & earth. I really like 7th Generation or Biokleen. Ecos is good too, but you can't get it w/o the soy softener anymore, so that puts the nix on it b/c of the cloth diaper situation.

As for the holes, clothes are made cheaply nowadays, it's unavoidable. I just bought a long sleeve Tshirt from Target washed it once and it has a tiny hole in it.

I would set aside any clothes that are stained from the rest of the laundry & pretreat immediately. Usually some dawn (real blue dawn) will take out any kind of oil stain, Joy (the real yellow joy) works okay too. Just dab it on the stain and then toss it in the laundry. It doesn't matter if you're not doing laundry for a few days. If you really want to boost it, shake some borax onto the wet soap and rub it to make a paste.

Are you washing on hot? That will fade things. We use only cold or cool for anything colored. It saves your electricity & your clothes. Hang dry anything that you really want to keep nice.

Also, you may not be using enough soap. Sun & Earth isn't HE rated (as far as I know since the last time I used it) so you are going to automatically need more of it than other types.

Good luck.

[mumkimum]

For fading: I turn a lot of our clothes inside out (esp. kid clothes, so they'll last longer). It helps a lot with avoiding fading for dark and patterned clothes. Ditto to washing on cold (I rarely wash clothes on warm, except occasional loads of light colors and dh's work clothes, which we wash separate anyway).

We do hang dry pretty much all our clothes, it does help with fading - you could obviously just hang some clothes to dry if you like. Hot dryer heat can be very hard on fabrics though, and contribute to extra wear. This could also be setting stains in the fabrics (again, since we wash on cold and hang dry, a lot of our stains eventually come out in a few washes even without any extra stain treatment - if I need I usually use a liquid laundry detergent and small scrub brush - I'll only rarely use oxiclean for bad kid stains I can't get out otherwise.)

Detergent-wise, we use charlies now, exclusively, and that's been fine for us. But might not be great for you if you've got really hard water (I think, if I remember correctly).

[mommathea]

Another thing is don't overload your washer. it should only be 3/4th full to do a proper wash.