Wash and Dry

There is a chance this may be the most useless post ever posted here. But there is also a chance that you have been living under a rock just like me and this post will change your life. I might be being dramatic here...
One of the biggest downers of thrifting is dry cleaning. It's great that you got a nice dress for under $10 but if you pay $17 to clean it, your celebratory feelings will be short-lived. Also short-lived will be your celebratory dance, and those are entertaining, let's not do anything to ruin those... When Wag-Jag had a deal on dry cleaning a while back, we snapped up a few vouchers but even with the discount, it adds up quickly. Of course, not reading the small print and realizing that we could only use one voucher at a time and only at a specific location, made the deal not quite as awesome as we anticipated. Lately, I have become rather rebellious and I often ignore the 'dry clean only' tag and only use dry cleaning as a last resort. What changed is that my friend taught me a tiny hand washing trick that made things much easier...
I find I have done the most accidental damage to clothing during the drying part of handwashing. The item is often heavy with water and wringing out excess water it can be difficult and unwieldy. If the item is too wet when you hang it up, it can stretch out in awkward places and alternately, a quick spin cycle can easily damage anything delicate. I ruined a great wool dress with a quick 3 minute spin cycle and the memory still stings... So now I hand wash and rinse an item as usual (cold water with a touch of detergent and vinegar (except with linen)) but I dry it in a much smarter way...

1. Wring item out very gently (just so you are not sloshing a tidal wave over your floors) and lay it out flat across a dry towel.
2. Roll up the towel with the washed article inside.
3. Press down all along the rolled up towel so the dry towel soaks up much of the moisture from the item inside.

With the towel absorbing most of the moisture and its weight, it can be hung up or laid out to dry without difficulty. I usually hang up anything made of woven fabric, while I always lay out any knits because they stretch...
I still dry clean some items; structured jackets, pleated items made of natural fabrics, anything that is crazy delicate or precious vintage are not worth risking. But my fairly decent collection of silk shirts all get hand washed despite their dry clean only tag... maybe if I paid $200 for an Equipment blouse, I would be hesitant to risk it but my $4 thrift store finds have survived splendidly.
Washing and drying this heavy alpaca sweater used to be like noodling a catfish; way too much wrestling... It would become so heavy and out of control that I could not even attempt to wring it and drying it would take days. The towel trick has changed  my life.
Ha. I sound like an infomercial... except I am not selling you a pair of pajama jeans. I am just sharing a really simple trick that a lot of people might already know...