Is anyone else freaked out about cleaning their dryer's lint filter given all the new fabric materials? I'm putting together a dryer-vac system to keep it from billowing into the air of our small laundry room.

Edit: Quickly searching, this appears to be the case? Specifically modern moisture sensing dryers that stop appropriately goes a long way to never having something shrink on you.

I've heard reports that the newer heat pump clothes dryers are less prone to cause shrinking. In their default mode they act more like a dehumidifier than a heater. In theory you can wash more delicate dry-clean only garments as well.

We have a lot of "shrinkage" in our house, that I am convinced is more due to both of us uhh "growing" rather than the clothes shrinking ;)

You can imagine, it's a delicate subject

Low temperature washes and avoiding tumble dryers works. I've also noticed thicker material t-shirts seem to definitely shrink a lot less! Much thinner cottton t-shirts seem to shrink a lot more, my mental model is that there's less material so when it bunches together to it's "happy place", it ends up a lot smaller. I have no evidence for this though.

Any other tips from people here? Also, has anyone actually tried stretching with hair conditioner?

https://www.ihateironing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/07...

I can't help but be curious now; is this something that other people my age (born in the early 90s) had heard when they were kids? Did people who grew up earlier than that hear it when they were kids, or did this idea maybe not reach mainstream status until a bit later (maybe my parents were relatively early in repeating this wisdom)? Or maybe it's something that used to be common knowledge that's been "lost" to newer generations for some reason? I'm genuinely a bit surprised to see that this article was published just last summer, since I assumed that the basic premise would be have something the average person would have learned before then from existing sources. Maybe I'm assuming too much about whether this article was intended to be about the "what" rather than the "why", but the language seems intended to be approachable to those from a non-scientific background (e.g. "on a chemical level, there are also links between the chains called hydrogen bonds"; I would expect someone talking to another scientist to be more direct and say something like "there are hydrogen bonds" with the expectation that they understood what they were already).

What odd language!

The fact that cotton-poly blends resist shrinking and wrinkling better than natural fibers has been known for like 80 years. While it may be that research continues, the "promising innovation" era of this category lapsed eons ago.

I'm also mystified why the article would not at least acknowledge the existence of something called pre-shrunk cotton, which is a material that is put through processes that cause shrinking before being measured and cut for clothing, to minimize further after-market shrinkage for the consumer.

BTW Rayon is also made from cellulose, cellulose II. While Cellulose I(natural) is metastable it can be converted by disolving in lye to a stable form (beta-gllocouse molecolue chain goes from being parallel to being anti parllel which increases the # of hydrogen bonds as well as helping create a more stable 3d structure) which again improve tensile strength and resist wrinkles on a different scale.

I'd use it for children's clothes. After you wash the clothes, you wait for the kid to grow a bit before they wear it again. No more growing out of your favourite things.

Can someone who knows things about textiles explain to me how the above is different than all the many items I own that say on the label, 60%/40% blend polyester/cotton, etc. I assumed that's what these were.

Shockingly, after hand washing them for the first time in cold water, the sleeves have shrunk so dramatically that I cannot wear them any longer, except to roll up the sleeves Up to beyond the elbow.

They just lost customer for life. Enshittification strikes again.