We’ve all experienced the phenomenon. You put a pair of dirty socks in the hamper, then move the clothes through the washing machine and dryer before setting them in the laundry basket (or, if you’re like me, on the guest bed) to fold. But when you go to fold that beautiful, clean laundry, one of the two socks has disappeared. It happens in bulk in our house: multiple socks go missing in a single load because half the load is dirty socks — school socks, play socks, baseball and softball socks, bounce house socks, novelty socks, cozy fuzzy socks, I digress.
Well, I’ve had enough. So we have instituted a new sock loss-prevention process in our laundry routine. It’s simple enough and keeps the socks from wandering off at washing time.
If you’re looking for a way to stop losing socks in the wash, here’s what’s worked for us: I collect and wash all of the kids’ socks in a delicates bag. As soon as the socks come off, they go right into the bag, and we zip it. The mesh laundry bag I happened to have has two sections, so we put our school uniform socks in one side and other miscellaneous socks in the other. We put the bag in the wash with the rest of the load, and it’s not reopened until it’s time to fold the clean laundry.
One pro tip: The socks will wash and dry best if they are not wadded up into themsevles when they are put in the bag — or at least when the bag is put in the wash.
Since we’ve started this routine, we have not had any socks abscond. And let me tell you, it’s a beautiful thing to have clean sock pairs when you need them!
You could try this using a seperate sock basket instead of a delicates bag, but I fear that the socks still could escape from such an unsecured container. Socks are very sneaky.
