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OKAY SO. You know how we talk about how one way fast fashion has made itself ānecessaryā is that the clothing looks like shit and feels horrible after just a few washes?
Let. Me. Tell. You. Something.
Laundry stripping is a process where you load your laundry into a tub or bin (Iāve been using my bathtub) with warm water, half a cup of borax, half a cup of washing soda, and half a cup of laundry soap (not detergent, SOAP, thereās a chemical difference). Leave it there for at least eight hours. Iāve been going for 12-24.
What you will come back to is a tub full of nearly-opaque black-gray-brown water that absolutely REEKS. This is normal. You are looking at (and smelling) hard water buildup, body sweat and oils that were embedded in the fabric, dead skin, and just regular grime.
Wring out your clothes. Throw them in the washer. (I like to do a spin-only cycle before going any further, because I have one of those washers that determines by weight how much water any given load needs.) Wash as usual.
You will notice I didnāt suggest any further pretreatment, and thatās because 1) you donāt want to layer too many chemicals on top of each other but also 2) you may not even need it.
When your clothes come out, check each one as it goes into the dryer, and if anything else s still stained, set it aside to run again with a regular pretreatment. One of the sweaters I did this with apparently did need a second treatmentā¦to deal with what appears to have possibly been a hot chocolate stain that was previously invisible due to āwell, itās oldā dinginess. I was planning to throw this sweater out. It looks almost new now. I need to wash it one more time for the probably-a-hot-chocolate stain, and then it needs to have the hem weighted to block it and bring it back to evenness, but dude. I wear my clothes to rags and I thought this thing was unfixable. āI need to reshape itā is nothing.
Remove clothes from dryer when done. Fucking MARVEL at the colors and how good the fabric feels. Give them a smell. Get righteously and royally angry that you can rejuvenate this stuff so easily, with a process that does take awhile but is 90% hands-off, but weāve been trained to believe itās all got to be binned once a year because discoloration and gross fabric is ānormal wear and tearā and canāt be fixed.
Itās utterly unreal! I just pulled a seven-year-old work undershirt out of the dryer and this thing looks NEW!! It FEELS almost new!!! One of the shirts I hung up from the last load is older than some of the people on this site and it went from āI keep this to wear on laundry day, for sentimental reasonsā to āI could actually wear this out of the house, it looks old but respectableā! The pajama bottoms Iām wearing were from Goodwill and they have BRIGHT YELLOW in them! I thought it was goldenrod!!
I do not know how often youāre supposed to do this (doing it every time can strip the dye out of your clothes, not to mention itās way too much work to do every time), but once or twice per season seems respectable. I donāt wear white, so I canāt test the āit will make whites look almost-new as wellā claim, but Iāve seen a lot of people on the cleaning subreddit attest that it works.
Just remember: WASHING soda. Not baking soda. I tried baking soda and a little bit happened, but not a lot.
Go forth. Rejuvenate your clothing. Strip your laundry.
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