How to Wash Winter Clothes

Find Out How to Keep Your Winter Clothes Looking Good With Our Top Tips.

When the cold winter weather arrives, it feels good to warm up by pulling on extra layers; however, more layers also means more laundry. Learning helpful tips for washing your winter clothes can help keep your sweaters looking great, reduce how much time you spend doing laundry, and even save you money.

Easy Ways to Wash Winter Clothes

One of the easiest changes you can make is to start washing your clothes in cold water. Cold water washing cuts energy use and can trim your electric bill, while also helping to reduce your carbon footprint.

We’ve got you covered with helpful winter laundry tips for washing down jackets, delicate sweaters, and all your family’s cold-weather clothing:

How Do You Wash a Jacket?

It’s a good idea to wash down coats, puffer jackets, and other coats a couple of times every season. We know that dry cleaning can be very costly, but how do you can maintain your winter coats at home? Well, you start by giving them a cold-water soak with a little detergent for a half hour. Then, wash on gentle and gently squeeze out excess water before drying on low. Not sure how to help re-fluff your jacket? Throwing in a few clean tennis balls to the drying cycle can help with that.

Winter Clothing Laundry Tips

• Wear a base layer. A winter base layer (like a T-shirt or camisole) helps keep you warm, and helps keep your sweaters clean so you don’t need to wash them as often.

• Re-wear sweaters, jeans, and pyjamas. In cooler months, we tend to sweat less, so you can feel good about wearing outer layers multiple times before washing - as long as they don’t have stains or odours. To freshen them up, tumble dry on low for a few minutes with a dryer sheet or ¼ cup of cold water.

• Organise hats, scarves, socks, and gloves in a mesh bag. A mesh bag helps keep gloves and socks in pairs and scarves from tying your other laundry in knots. Wash these items once a month to keep them fresh.

• When washing ‘performance clothing’ such as long underwear and fleece jackets, take extra caution with the product choice. While your preferred detergent would still work to wash the garment, things like laundry bleach and fabric softener are a no-go. Fabric softener can often alter or damage the fabric’s wicking properties when drying the garment.

How Do You Maintain a Jersey?

Some of our favourite winter fashion is knitwear like jerseys and sweaters, but these can sometimes be tricky to maintain and keep in the original shape. You can help your jerseys and sweaters stay shapely by following these easy steps:

1. Before washing, trace your jersey’s shape on a large piece of paper.

2. After washing, gently roll your jersey in a towel to remove extra water.

3. Simply re-shape your jersey to fit the outline. Drying flat ensures there isn’t extra pull or stretch on the fibre.

It is always ideal to hand wash knitwear, opposed to washing in the machine. Machine wash cycles (unless your machine has a setting for knitwear) can sometimes stretch the fibres resulting in a change of shape or sometimes even size! To hand wash knitted sweaters, jerseys ,or cashmere scarves, make sure you use the required dose of gentle laundry liquid (which dissolves quicker to avoid any residue).

Fill a bucket or sink with cold water, add the laundry liquid such as Skip Anti-Ageing Liquid Detergent, and swish the garments around. Empty the bucket/sink, refill with cold water, and swish again until they are rinsed clean. Repeat this step if needed to get all the soap out.

How to Dry Clothes in Winter?

Although winter months are colder, you can still ‘line dry’ your clothes during winter. Get creative by using the rod on your shower curtain or towel bars for drying clothes - or invest in a convenient drying rack that folds up when not in use to dry your clothes indoors. Air-dried clothes also add some natural humidity to the air.

To keep those air-dried clothes from going crunchy, toss 120ml of white vinegar in your laundry while it’s rinsing to help remove extra detergent and soften clothes. Then, before hanging to dry, give them a little shake. If that stiffness sticks around, try five minutes in the dryer with a wet cloth.

We hope these tips help you settle into a stress-free winter laundry routine so you can enjoy the best of what winter has to offer.