Cleaning & Organization
Home Living & Sustainability
Laundering and Mending Your Woolens with Eucalan
October 28, 2022
Autumn has fallen, there’s a chill in the air and we know you’re ready to pull out your cozy woolens to get them ready for wear! Whether your sweaters and accessories are handmade or store-bought, we’ve put together our top tips for keeping them looking beautiful (and smelling amazing) for years to come.
We recommend laundering your sweaters at the end of each spring, before you pack them away for the summer. This cleans them of any oils from your skin and makes them less palatable to moths and other fibre-loving insects. However, if you’ve missed that step, there’s no time like the present to launder your woolens.
Fill a basin with tepid water and add a capful of Eucalan Delicate Wash or the contents of a single use pod. Add your sweater and let sit for 20 minutes, then remove your sweater, gently squeezing to release excess water. You don’t want to wring your sweater – this will only pull it out of shape. Wrap it in a clean, dry towel and press gently to release more water. Lay flat to dry on another clean dry towel, gently pressing into shape. Dry away from heat and direct sunlight.
If you washed your sweaters before packing them away for the season, now is the perfect time to pull them out and freshen them up for wear! To get rid of creases and reblock your sweaters for wearing, you can skip the full wash. Instead, spray block your sweaters by lightly misting them with a spray bottle filled with a dash of Eucalan and cool water. Then press your sweater gently into shape and let dry.
Given enough use and wear, even the nicest sweaters and woolens will start to have little balls of fibre appear. Pilling occurs when loose fibres push up from the fabric, eventually gathering in small balls – simply washing and wearing can cause this! You can remove these pills using a variety of tools: a Sweater Stone, a Gleener, or a fabric comb. We have a great video that demonstrates how to de-pill a sweater.
Even with the best care, sweaters and other woolen items may develop holes over time. With a little creativity and ingenuity, you can mend these items and continue wearing them! If you find a defect along a seam, or while you still have some of the original yarn used in the project in reserve, you may be able to mend your item invisibly. If neither of these are an option, however, you may consider visible mending.
Visible mending is a new hot trend where you repair your garment using bright, fun colours or designs so that the mending itself becomes a feature of the garment. We found a great photo tutorial of mending for knit sweaters at Collingwood-Norris Design.
Interweave also has a couple of useful posts on visible mending. The first post has some tips and tricks on how to visibly mend your garments, though they focus on a pair of jeans rather than a sweater. The second post focuses on spinning yarn for visible mending. Either way, the steps are fairly similar:
If you’re looking for more resources on visible mending ideas and stitches there are a variety of books on Amazon as well as an article in one of the recent Mason-Dixon Field Guides, and the inspiring Tom of Holland’s The Visible Mending Programme. We also have a Pinterest board dedicated to visible mending.
We hope this post has helped you get excited for fall and for wearing your warm woolens again!
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