Line drying

I've been wanting to try line drying my clothes for a while, partly for environmental reasons, and partly because my machine dryer skills seem ... malformed. All of pants are ragged at the cuffs and backpockets, and my shirts develop holes in unusual places. The patterns that show up, suggest to me, a weakening of fabrics, the wear of forced hot air. Of course, I'm biased: much better that it's the fault of the tool, rather than the tool-user.

So now that we have a backyard of sorts, I finally got around to putting up a clothesline. I'm going to walk through what I did, since there seem to be few good references on what you want to pay attention to. Most resources play up the benefits of line drying, without looking at the details of how you get decently dried clothes from it. Maybe they're presuming that everyone grew up with it, or that it's obvious. I didn't find it to be.

First, I bought about 100 feet of cotton clothesline, along with three screw eyes and two bolt snaps. Our backyard is very small, and a little narrower than it is deep. On the back and part of the west side is a wooden fence, maybe six feet high. On the east side is the garage; extending into the back from the garage is a small overhang, supported by two sturdy posts. I attached one of the screw eyes into the west fence, in line with the furthest back post; one into that post; and the third into the west fence, in line with the other post (that is, the post nearest the house).

Next, I taped off the end of the clothesline, which was fraying. I tied the clothesline to the eye of the bolt snap, using a sliding sheet bend. A friend recommended using a trucker's hitch, but I couldn't figure that one out. The sliding sheet bend is pretty easy to tie, and I think that weight tends to cinch it tighter, even while you have the end piece that explodes the knot when you pull it. This makes it easy to put up and easy to take down, when the line starts to sag too much. I attached the hook to one of the screw hooks on the western fence, then ran the line to the post, threading it through the screw hook there (to fix it vertically), then wrapped it around several times (to ensure it wouldn't slip). I ran it back through the screw hook and over to the other hook on the western fence. I tied the end of the clothes line to the other bolt snap, and hooked it into the third screw hook.

At this point, I ran into a problem. While the sliding sheet bend is pretty easy to tie, and explodes, and seems to hold well, what it doesn't do very well is hold onto a length of line at the end. That is, to get it tight, I wound up feeding it too much line, which meant the line sagged when it was in place. So what I did was tie a knot short of the end of the line, which held the knot in place. I had to do some trial and error with this to get it tight, which meant I then had to strain to pull the latch into place around the screw hook (if it had been easy, it would have sagged). When I revamp this (which I want to do when it starts to sag), I think what I'll want to do is replace the bolt snap with something that is similar, but has the ability to screw into a shorter or longer position, so that the line can be tied to it, fairly taut, it can be hooked into place, and then screwed tight. This should also help to make minor adjustments for slackness.

Of course, getting it into place was only one part of the challenge. How to line dry isn't necessarily obvious. The best resource I could find was Home Comforts, which talks through the process, and also provides details for how to hang individual types of clothes (jeans, t-shirts, button-up shirts, dresses, sheets, etc.). The author also provides a diagram to go along with hanging up clothing types. This seems to have similar advice, without diagrams. The essence of the Home Comforts advice is that you're battling wrinkles, and have three weapons: the sun, the wind, and gravity. The first thing that you want to do is shake the wrinkles out, by snapping the item, cracking it like a whip. You then want to hang it in such a way that you expose as much of it as you can to the wind, in a single layer, with the heaviest part of the garment on the bottom (so that its weight helps to pull wrinkles out). However, to secure the garment to the line, you also need to fold a couple of inches over the line, to counter balance a little bit and give the pins something to hold onto. If there's a high wind, you'll want to fold more over. (Of course, you don't want to be drying in high wind conditions, anyway: the best is a light breeze.) Next, for those things that you need to fold over on themselves (like sheets), you want the top to be open so that it catches the breeze and sends it between the layers. Finally, you have two kinds of pins at your disposal. The one piece pins that you just push down are good when you don't need to worry about stretching the fabric out a little bit. Two piece pins (with a metal hinge) are necessary when you don't want little horns poking out of the shoulders of your dress shirts, or when the fabric might not take the sliding pressure of the other pins very well. (I found this out with a pair of socks.) One last thing to note: colors that you're concerned about fading shouldn't go into direct sunlight: over time, they'll bleach out. However, whites should go in the sunlight, since you're trying to keep them bleached. Moreover, sunlight (UV, in particular) acts as a disinfectant, killing whatever germs may have survived the wash.

So, armed with this knowledge, how did I do? I did three loads of laundry my first day with this. The first two were mostly sheets; the last one was t-shirts and pants. It took a while to put everything up, but I impressed with how quickly everything dried after that. There's always the problem of crevices--the folds where garments are attached to the line, pockets, and armputs--which take a while to dry, but I found that by monitoring them, it was pretty easy to rearrange the clothes to expose those parts, once the rest of the garment was dry. The sheets dried more quickly than in a machine dryer, while t-shirts and pants (particularly pants) were slower. However, it wasn't a day long process, as I expected. I did find out that I had too little line for a load, and had to add a temporary third line. Between these three, however, I have enough for a full load, plus enough to hang out a couple of slow-drying stragglers.

Most of the sheets came out very nicely. Newer, cotton sheets were a little stiff, but we slept in them last night, and they were fine. T-shirts and pants were also a little stiff, but they seem to loosen up fine. Next weekend I'm going to try experimenting with fabric softener and finishing clothes off with a few minutes in the machine dryer, to see if that makes anything much softer. Of course, one thing that contributes to stiffness is not having all of the detergent (including softener) washed out, so that one may fail pretty badly.

(You can see a few other clothesline photos .)