HOW TO LOVE YOUR LAUNDRY

And

You know how to do laundry, right? Divide between darks, whites and colours. Sort your bedlinen and towels from your delicates – and, voilà, into the machine they go with your detergent of choice, perhaps some fabric softener and a spritz of stain-removing spray. Done.

Wrong. Step forward laundry guru Patric Richardson. A man so obsessed with laundry he received a child-size washing machine for his third birthday and learned to wash and dry his own clothes before he was ten. Patric has dedicated years to the study and conservation of textiles. His mission? To make laundry not just faster, cheaper and kinder to the environment but more fun, too.

In fact, if you do your laundry right it will improve more than your whites

– it’ll improve your life, the planet and possibly even your soul. We need to stop seeing laundry as a tedious chore and see it as cathartic: think of the satisfaction of the washing blowing on the line or a neatly folded pile of sparkling whites. If you shift your perspective – and laundry methods – it becomes less stressful, more mindful. Think how soothing the quiet, repetitive folding of clean clothes is and how satisfying it is to the eye when they are placed neatly in the drawer, smelling of soap and fresh air.

When it comes to cleaning, our clothes are bossy. Their tags bully us into time-sucking techniques, and before we know it, each article of clothing is trying to tell us what to do – and none of it is simple. Speaking of time-sucking, did you know a family of four runs on average nine loads of laundry a week at roughly one hour 25 minutes per load? That’s nearly 13 hours a week. Well, not any more. Follow Patric’s simple steps for life-enhancing laundry and you’ll be able to slash that to four hours and ten minutes a week. And that’s not all – he also has tips on getting your whites whiter, keeping your denims blue and reveals how never to pay a dry-cleaning bill again…

Thought the washing was just another chore? Not so, says laundry guru Patric Richardson (yes, that is his job). Do it right and you can improve your whites your life

1. DITCH THE DETERGENT

Popular detergents are loaded with petrochemicals: bad for your clothes, skin and the environment. Pods are even worse – there’s enough detergent in a single pod to wash five loads of clothes.

Fabric softener should also go, too. It coats your clothes with silicone, cutting their absorbency by up to 80 per cent, fills the spaces between yarns so clothes can’t breathe and makes stains incredibly hard to shift. What’s more, one of the main ingredients in softener is ‘dihydrogenated tallow dimethyl ammonium chloride’, derived from horse, cow, and sheep fat – which is why fragrance is added.

2. RETHINK YOUR LAUNDRY LIST

Wash your clothes using soap flakes or a high-quality, plant-based liquid laundry soap that is free of petroleum, phosphate, phthalates and parabens and includes words such as nontoxic, biodegradable, allergen free and bleach free. Also make sure you have the following items (all will become clear as you read on):

Blacks. Cool colours

and greys.

activewear,

– blues, greens, purples

Warm colours

– reds, yellows, browns, and oranges.

The reason behind sorting the cool colours from the warm is that if a micro dye bleed occurs in the wash of either of these loads, no one will even notice, but if you mix cool colours with warm, a blue bleed, for example, might dot a red blouse with purple or a yellow T-shirt with green.

If in any of your colour piles you have

eg, spandex or other high-tech workout fabrics, to get these really clean and smelling good, you’ll need to add some hydrogen peroxide to your wash, which kills the bacteria that can lead to bad odours.

Also if you have any in your piles, the best way to wash them is to turn each item inside out and place in a mesh bag, one item per bag. If your bag is too big, fold it over and fasten the mesh in

wool and silk items

place with safety pins. Wool items should be folded, rolled and stuffed tightly like a giant sausage in the mesh bag – if necessary fold over and secure with safety pins to make the bag fit more snugly – to stop them rubbing against other clothes in the machine, which is what makes them matt and emerge smaller. Once bagged up, return your items to their colour piles – you don’t have to wash them separately.

4. MASTER YOUR MACHINE

These days, most of the technology is built into your washing machine, so for nearly every wash, you’ll need to do just two things. First, wash everything in warm water – select a temperature of around 30C-40C. Second, wash everything on the express cycle (also called the fast, quick or super-speed cycle). This is much kinder to your clothes than a full cycle, helping them last longer since we’re no longer prolonging the time they’re exposed to soap, water and other clothes.

5.

Where you can, air dry your clothes rather than using a tumble dryer: it’s better for the environment and your clothes will last longer. But when you do use the dryer – which Patric says he does for T-shirts, underwear, sheets and towels – toss in at least three wool dryer balls, which reduce the time spent drying clothes by up to 40 per cent. If you’re feeling fancy, add a couple of drops of essential oil to the wool dryer balls to scent your laundry.

When drying towels, add bumpy rubber dryer balls, which help separate laundry and plump up the cloth. And his final trick is to place a tightly rolled ball of aluminium foil – roughly the size of a cricket ball – in every dryer load to discharge static. Simply throw it into your dryer and it should last about 60 loads, getting increasingly smaller with each. Once it shrinks to the size of a golf ball, put it into your recycling bin and make a new ball.