I don’t know why, but every time I feel inspired to write about hanging laundry outside there’s something to keep me from doing it.  At the beginning of the summer it was thunderstorms every night.  We haven’t had any rain for a couple of weeks, but now I have a huge mound of dirt covering my yard right under my clothesline from the excavation of our new patio area, so for the last few days (and presumably more than just another few to come), I’ll be using my dryer.

But times like these are actually exceptions for us once the weather is warm.  I used to hang laundry outside year round when living overseas – I didn’t have a dryer until right before my fifth child was born.  In the winter I was very aware of the weather – when the sun shone, my priority was getting my laundry out right away to take advantage of it.  When it was rainy for a few days, I’d hang the clothes inside.  

Then I moved back to the States where our rental home had a dryer but no clothesline.  While I appreciated the convenience of a dryer, I missed hanging the clothes outside and finally asked dh last year to put up a clothesline for me. I’d tried two or three different drying racks over the years but found them flimsy and their holding capacity was so small that when I used them I wasn’t sure if they were a  help or hindrance.  I hung some things on hangers indoors, and while it lessened my dryer usage, it wasn’t very practical for small items. (I found a solution to this several months ago, though – you can clip small items onto hangers with clothespins and it uses the space very efficiently.)

So here are some tips for how to hang your clothes on the clothesline.  They may be obvious to many of you, but they weren’t all obvious to me and they sure aren’t obvious to my kids! 

– To start with, elevate your basket of wet laundry so that you’re not unnecessarily bending repeatedly and wasting energy – I put mine on the Little Tikes kiddie picnic table we have in the yard.

– Make sure you have lots more clothespins than you think you’ll need.  They disappear quickly.

– Sharply shake your clothes made of a material that holds wrinkles before hanging them so that they dry wrinkle-free – like denim skirts. 

– Hang clothing so that when it’s dry the mark of the clothespins were isn’t visible: hang shirts upside down or on hangers, skirts at waist, pants at the cuff.  If you’re using a dryer rack, place items so that the dryer line isn’t in the middle of them. 

– To avoid fading, turn dark clothing inside out.  I learned about the bleaching power of the sun the hard way when I did my first load of laundry in Israel as a seminary student.  I hung my dark cotton tops on the clothing rack, and when I went out to bring them in, I found the sun had bleached the half facing it lighter than the side not facing it.  Also, hang the item so that it’s evenly exposed to the sun, not like what I did. 

– On the positive flip side, the sun is a wonderful whitener!  I schedule my laundry washing so that we hang the light loads first, when the sun is strongest.   If I get busy or go out for hours, it doesn’t matter if they end up hanging for hours.  Then I hang the darks in the later part of the day, when the sun isn’t shining directly on my clothesline for hours.  If something has a stain, hang it so that it’s facing the sun.

– If your neighbors will see your hanging laundry, for privacy’s sake hang undergarments on an inner line, and large things like sheets and towels on the external lines.  Try to be sensitive to what they’ll see from their window when you decide where to hang your clothesline – we put ours to that it runs parallel to the fence between us and our immediate neighbor.  Other neighbors don’t have to look at it, and because of the positioning of our neighbor’s windows, it’s not something that ruins their view of the outdoors, either.

– Here’s a tip I recently learned about but haven’t yet had a chance to try because of the patio preparations.  Before you hang up your clothes, see if you can tell what direction the wind is blowing in.  When you identify that, hang your clothing so that you’re only pinning one side to the line, and the air will blow through the clothes and dry them superfast.  (To clarify, imagine you’re hanging a pillowcase: instead of clamping both parts of the opening together so that it’s hanging closed, put a clothespin on each end but not on both layers –  does that make sense?)

– Some things will dry kind of crunchy, like towels.  You can run clothes after they are mostly dry through the dryer for 5 – 10 minutes to remove that, if it bothers you.  I don’t care about towels but I do care about scratchy cloth diapers on my little ones’ bottoms, so usually cloth diapers go in the dryer. 

Why bother with the effort of hanging your clothes?  Well, using free solar energy to dry your clothing instead of paying the power company for the same result is a frugal thing to do!  I suppose you’re getting some exercise, too.  But for me, it’s more than that.  I really enjoy hanging clothes outside.  It may seem that I’m spending time on something that I could do more quickly with the help of an appliance, but while I’m hanging the laundry, I’m enjoying the air, the sun, the sounds of the birds….It’s a time that I can combine doing what I need to do while being able to relax and be more mindful, to think instead of rushing from one thing that needs to be done to the next.  Time to breathe deeply and enjoy the world around us, to slow down without feeling guilty, is something every busy mom can benefit from on a regular basis!

Avivah