Laundry...To Sort or Not To Sort

Do people still sort laundry by color before washing clothes?  I don’t … I take the time to wash my hand wash only clothes using the “hand wash” setting on my washing machine ~ everything else gets shoved into one load and washed together on the “normal” setting.

Laundering technology has seen many advancements since I was a kid helping Mom sort clothes into Lord only knows how many piles (growing up on a farm meant a lot more sorting than just by color … degree and type of filth had to be factored into the process).  If I still had to deal with farm clothes, then I would likely take the time to sort … BUT, I don’t.  I live in town and only deal with the laundry generated between me and my son.  I have had recent conversations with other folks around town and it seems that there are, indeed, still people out there that take the time to separate clothes by color.

To be perfectly candid, I consider it a significant win when I remember to take the clothes out of the dryer … so I won’t say much about the folding and putting away of said clothes.  I probably should take the time to complete this process because I’m not sure that I am saving myself any time by pawing through the basket of clean clothes to find the shirt I could have sworn I had just washed … and even when I do get clothes folded, I get distracted by other projects so the piles of folded clothes sit on my bed and then get transferred back into the laundry basket, or set in front of the dresser because I’m too tired to take the time to figure out what is supposed to go in which drawer … and I’m still wondering what happened to that shirt I was looking for.  The next morning, I remember I have a similar colored shirt that might be hanging in the closet … I cautiously open the closet door so nothing falls out on top of me and run my fingers over the shoulders of each of the shirts that have been packed like sardines into my overstuffed closet.  ((( Sad when I remember that 3 years earlier I had cleaned it out and donated over half of what I had at that time. )))  Finally, I find the other shirt and pull it out, letting out a huge sigh because it is horribly wrinkled.  I know I own an iron and might even be able to find it, but by the time I realize how badly wrinkled the shirt is I have less than 30 minutes to make it to the doctor appointment I completely forgot about until my calendar alert popped up.  I know, I’ll just throw on a cardigan and call it covered – problem solved, sort of.  For the record, I found the missing shirt in the dryer a week later – on the plus side, it wasn’t still in the washer!!

The wrinkled shirt incident was annoying, funny, but annoying … … back to sorting laundry … … no, just no … … If my son wears pink socks because I forgot to wash the new red shirt separately, well, it builds character.  He’s lucky to have clean socks to wear and even more lucky because they just became one of a kind designer “socks by Mom”!!