Laundering is easily explained. Indeed, the basic steps of laundering have not changed for at least a century and a half.
Every week or so, when enough of your clothes and linens are soiled to make doing a wash worthwhile, you gather them all together in one place and separate them into loads, or heaps on the floor, of items that can safely receive similar laundering. Paying attention to fiber content and care labels, you sort them according to their color and dye-fastness, the type of cloth they are made of and the way they are made—their sturdiness or fragility—how dirty they are and what the dirt is, and other characteristics, watching out for stains and especially hard-to-remove soil as you go. These difficult spots you treat immediately, either with liquid detergent, a paste of detergent powder and water, or a product specially manufactured for the purpose. Once the loads are separated and stains treated, you wash the clothes in sudsy water that is cool, warm, or hot, depending on the kind of cloth. Sometimes, one or more garments need hand-washing, whether because they are so delicate or because they are not colorfast or are prone to shrinking or for some other reason. Most, however, you wash in your washing machine, one load after another. Then you dry each load, either in your dryer or on a clothesline, drying rack, or hanger. After the laundry is dry, some people will iron wrinkled things smooth. Garments and linens that will not be ironed—all of them, in many households—are hung or folded. All are then replaced in closets and drawers or on shelves, ready to be used again. At regular intervals, you repeat this series of steps—storing, using, gathering, sorting, washing, drying, ironing and folding, restoring. It’s simple.
Why, then, is this book more than four hundred pages long? Because each of these steps is a place where you can trip. The potential causes and kinds of missteps are remarkably numerous, and there are countless opportunities to fine-tune your methods. The more you know and the greater your experience, the fewer money-, time-, and labor-consuming errors you will make. A book like this cannot confidently claim to have included every fact or technique that someone might look for, but its pages are crammed with facts, some for beginners and others for experts, that will be useful in someone’s laundry. No one needs to know all of them. Many are about fabrics or linens or clothes or laundry facilities completely unlike yours. Some are geared toward standards that are irrelevant to your circumstances or possessions. For just as good cooking includes everything from hamburgers on your grill to Julia Child’s Crêpes Gourées et Flambées, so laundering can be done either in a perfectly satisfying rough-and-ready way or with elegant finesse—or something in between. What is best for your household depends on your own time, resources, needs, tastes, tolerances, goals, and belongings.