Number Two Son recently changed the curtains in his room. He still had the same curtains that were on the window when we moved in over 15 years ago. I had an extra set of curtains that I made for the same size window in another room and when I swapped those out I offered those to him if he would put them up himself. He took them and put them up and asked what I wanted him to do with the old curtains. I should have thrown them out because we don’t need them and probably would never use them again but I have a really hard time throwing out anything that is in any way, possibly usable, maybe someday – I’m not a hoarder; I do throw stuff away, it’s just sometimes really hard – so I told him to just put them in the dirty clothes hamper and I would wash them and put them away somewhere whenever I got around to it.
I got around to it today. They were simple rod-pocket curtains, plain, off-white, kind of ugly, some kind of silky fabric. It might have been actual silk or maybe rayon. There were no washing instructions. I have a front loading washer and I wash almost everything the same way: cold water, normal cycle and dry on either medium or low. It always works out fine. I tossed the curtains in with some other random white and light colored stuff, nothing important, a couple of t-shirts, some dish cloths. The dryer was already on low and it wasn’t much stuff so I just left it on that setting. Later I just took it all out of the dryer in one armful.
When I pulled out the lint filter to clean it – I’m really good about that by the way; every single load, always clean the lint filter – when I pulled it out to clean it there was a huge amount of white fluff. At first I just thought, “What the hell made that?” but then I thought of the curtains. They were the only thing in that load that I hadn’t washed at least dozens of times before. But they really didn’t seem like the kind of fabric that would make all that fluff so, still curious, I looked in the basket of unfolded laundry. All that was left of the curtains were strings held together by strings. (Everything else was fine, of course.)
I threw the mass of clean stringy stuff in the trash, thinking, “It would have been simpler to just do this in the first place.”
September 21st, 2011 - 7:20 pm
I once had some cheap, crappy curtains that I bought at Walmart that were dry-clean only. They were made of part rayon and cotton, I think — I do know that rayon was in them. I wasn’t about to spend the money to dry-clean curtains I bought at Walmart, so I never washed them. I didn’t keep them for very long, though; I decided I didn’t like the color, and took them down and (I think) gave them to Goodwill. But I wonder what would have happened to them if I did throw them in a washing machine. I don’t know why they make cheap curtains out of stuff you have to dry-clean. It makes no sense to me.
September 21st, 2011 - 7:27 pm
Hard to know for sure. Some fabric makers or clothing makers put “dry clean” as the cleaning instruction on stuff because they don’t want to be bothered to figure out the best method, or don’t want to be bothered to deal with customers who washed stuff on hot that was supposed to be washed on cold and wanted to gripe at them about it.
I will say I’ve successfully machine-washed (on gentle) some rayon things that were marked “dry clean.” But there may be a difference between ‘dry clean’ and “dry clean only.”
(More often than not I try it with fabric I buy on a good sale, than with finished clothes. I tend to avoid buying “dry clean only” clothes because that’s just another expense I’d rather avoid.)