Preventing laundry pilling

Laundry is something that everyone has to deal with. If you want to have fresh, clean clothes to wear and you can’t afford to use dry cleaning for every item, then you need to know how to deal with the clothes that you own. You must treat stains, separate your clothes by color and handle clothes in a manner that will help limit the amount of pilling that occurs in the laundry.

Pilling is unattractive and it reduces the value of your clothing. Laundering plays a very important part in the maintenance of your clothing. While pilling doesn’t affect the life and use of clothing, it does make them less likely to be worn. If you don’t like the way a piece of clothing looks, you aren’t going to wear it.

Everyone has seen those unsightly little balls that seem to appear almost mysteriously on the sides, under the arms of sweaters and on the inside of pants where the thighs meet. Most pilling is caused by friction. That is why it shows up where the material rubs. It is often the result of loose weaving in less expensive fabrics but if you think you’re really expensive clothing is not going to pill, you are wrong.

Some fabrics, denim, in particular, are quite resistant to pilling but luxury fabrics such as cashmere are very apt to pill.

Now that you know what pilling is and how it is caused, what can you do to stop it from being aggravated by the way you are laundering your clothes? The first thing that you can do, with no additional cost to yourself, is to turn your clothes inside out before washing. Before you do that, you can look for stains that need to be pretreated.

One thing that can help is a mesh lingerie bag. If you can afford it, you can buy several and wash all of your clothes that are prone to pilling in a mesh bag. The less your clothes rub against other clothes, the less likely they are to develop additional pilling. Another thing that you can do is to wash smaller loads. You may even want to wash items that are especially vulnerable to pilling alone in the machine on a delicate cycle.

If you have some expensive pieces which are already showing that pilling is going to be an issue, you may want to just hand wash them alone and dry them flat on a drying rack or wrapped in a towel. This is much more work and obviously, you could spend a great deal of time doing hand laundry if you have a large amount of your wardrobe that is prone to pilling. It is a good idea, before you purchase items, to look at them and see that they are tightly woven and less likely to pill.

Once you have pilling, you can remove it by hand by cutting off the little balls or by purchasing one of the “shavers” that were created to do this job. Again, it is a time-consuming endeavor and with pilling, the old adage “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is particularly apropos. Avoiding fabrics that pill and being careful to prevent it from happening are the best way to go.