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Comment by jakub_g | Hacker News Reader

I feel obliged to share a lifehack my mother taught me regarding the laundry.

After removing the laundry, take your t-shirts and stretch them yourself, one by one, when they're still slightly wet. Grab them with two hands symmetrically, stretch horizontally, moving your hands down along the shirt. Do the same vertically, and with the sleeves.

Do not use a machine dryer, just a regular standing dryer like [1].

Put your t-shirts carefully, symmetrically on the dryer, and once dry, put them on a hanger. If you follow this, you will not have to iron them at all.

Source: been doing this for 4 years and I didn't touch the iron since. I have all t-shirts 100% cotton (though I buy only high-grammage ones) and they all seem brand new and ironed (the only exception being one particular brand whose collar looks bad unless ironed, I stopped buying that brand). YMMV of course.

[1] http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41oWjx2Q-mL._SY300_.jp...

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I've never ironed a T-shirt. I didn't know ironing t-shirts was a thing people did.

My wife irons her yoga pants. She doesn't like even the chance of a crease or wrinkle.

How yogic of her.

My friend's Romanian and his parents iron EVERYTHING. Including socks and underwear.

Well we are in Hacker News after all - the uniform is to wear hoodies at all times.

A similar hack I learned to avoid ironing:

Just before hanging them, while they are still wet:

Grab each t-shirt from the top with both hands, then do a couple of violent whip-like movements. This has the same effect of stretching the fabric so that no ironing is needed.

If you do it right, you can get a nice crack sound. I've found that I can usually get at one from a freshly washed item of clothing (and towels) and it only cracks once per fresh wash. I don't understand the mechanism that causes it but find it satisfying for some reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipcracking

"The crack a whip makes is produced when a section of the whip moves faster than the speed of sound creating a small sonic boom."

(I agree that is a strangely satisfying thing. It does make hanging the wash up for drying slightly less tedious...)

Do you want to sprinkle water everywhere? Because that's how you prinkle water everywhere.

Only if you have a rubbish washing machine that spits out very wet clothes. Mine is a front loading ASKO which spins the clothes to the point of being touch dry. I give each t-shirt a whip-shake and dry them in a cool tumble dryer.

It's funny. As I was reading the entire post I kept thinking, "You know, these guys could have saved so much time by just asking a bunch of Moms."

> I feel obliged to share a lifehack my mother taught me regarding the laundry. After removing the laundry, take your t-shirts and stretch them yourself, one by one, when they're still slightly wet. Grab them with two hands symmetrically, stretch horizontally, moving your hands down along the shirt. Do the same vertically, and with the sleeves.

Interesting, I never considered this a hack. Noone told me this, but I always do it. Ironing is never needed. I do it with pants too.

I didn't consider it a hack until I've seen a friend of mine having stuff thrown carelessly on the dryer, everything unpleasantly crumpled

> Do not use a machine dryer, just a regular standing dryer like.

How does this contraption dry clothes? Looks like someone tried to take a clothesline indoors.

No problem taking a clothesline indoors in case you can't or don't want to take the laundry outdoors: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_horse

This is a common way to dry clothes in Korea. I've only ever seen 1 dryer in an apartment the whole time I've been here. A typical dryer rack looks like this: http://newimg.globalmarket.com/PicLib/441/35441/prod/4_13501...

It's called 'evaporation'.

On a less sarcastic note: Water has no problem evaporating at room temperature. A batch of clothes is usually dry overnight. In fact you can even dry stuff at below-zero temperatures through sublimation.

The trick I was taught was to dry the light clothes (shirts, underwear, socks) separately from the heavy clothes (jeans, hoodies). Then hang the shirts up immediately after pulling them out of the dryer while they are still hot. Then you won't need to iron your shirts. It may not work really well for some dress shirts though.

My wife has a similar trick that we've been using successfully.

After removing the laundry, we fold everything neatly, and leave them stacked on top of each other for 30-60 mins. Than we dry them with a standing dryer.

Haven't ironed t-shirts or jeans since we got married.

I've been using the same technique for a while and it's working quite well. Unfortunately, it's only for tee-shirts and not shirts, so the iron is still required from times to times.

Yep, that's true, it doesn't work that well for some shirts, but it depends on each model. The variance in shirts is bigger than in t-shirts.

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