It's been weeks, but today I decided I was finally going to get the pile of laundry that's taking up half of my queen size bed under control and put away in my closet. (Yeah, clean laundry. I don't mind the washing and drying, it's the putting away that gets me every time.) I was putting everything on hangers to go in my closet when I got to the purple dress I just bought. Okay, I bought it a year ago, but I just wore it for the first time a couple of weeks ago, which means I still categorize it as new.
Anyway, when I pulled this dress out of the dryer last week--or whenever it was that I did my laundry, now I can't even remember, isn't that terrible?--I thought it looked a little bit short, like it had shrunk in the wash. But I haven't had anything shrink in the wash since I was about 14 and took control of my own laundry from my mother. She liked to dry everything on the highest setting, which shrunk a lot of my clothing. Although when I was 14, shirts that clung to me like a second skin and barely covered my belly button were all I wore, so maybe I should have looked at it as a blessing in disguise. But there was my school dress code to be (at least a little bit) mindful of, so the shrinking of shirts that I was barely getting away with as it was was something of a problem.
Anyway...
I thought it must just be my imagination, or I was remembering the dress longer than it was...because no way did it shrink in the wash. I dry everything on the lowest setting possible (I think it's actually the one labeled "delicates" on the dryer knob) to avoid such catastrophes. So to put my mind at ease, I decided to try the dress on. You know, prove to myself that my laundry skills were intact. But you know what? They weren't. The dress was definitely shorter than when I bought it, and when I wore it two weeks ago. I know this because if it had been that short in the store, I wouldn't have bought it. (14-year-old me might have, but not present-day knee-length-skirt-wearing me.) How could this have happened??
I don't pay much mind to washing instructions. None at all, really. Well, I try not to buy things that say dry clean only, because I know if they make it into my closet, they will go in the washer, just like everything else I own. Hand wash, wash only with like colors, lay flat to dry...it may as well be written in martian for all the attention I pay to those instructions. It all goes in the washer (cold water, with a Color Catcher. No, I don't even separate my lights from my darks.), and then into the dryer. All of it. And I've never seen this as a problem, because I've never had a problem washing my clothes this way. (I once bought a silk shirt at Old Navy that was barely more than a tank top, and who dry cleans tank tops? When it came out of the washer/dryer just fine, I was completely sold on the idea of washing instructions as nothing more than a way for dry cleaners to drum up business.)
So I took the dress off and looked at the tag. Hand wash in cold water. Nothing out of the ordinary. I at least feel a little guilty about the dry clean only stuff, but I don't even bat an eyelash at stuff you're supposed to hand wash. So what was so special about this dress that would make it shrink so much? The fabric content says it's 100% rayon. Still, I'm baffled. Isn't cotton supposed to be the incredible shrinking fabric? I love rayon; it's even softer than cotton. And I never thought of it as a shrinking hazard before. Surely I own other rayon items? I can't remember it ever being an issue.
I put the dress on its hanger and laid it on my bed with all the other stuff waiting to be hung up, and when I reached into the laundry pile again, I pulled out this shirt I bought from Express a couple of years ago, and suddenly remembered that it shrank a little bit the first time I washed it too. So I looked at the tag, and what do you know? It's 100% rayon too.
Thus, I have learned a valuable lesson tonight. Rayon shrinks. A lot. Consistently. On the plus side, that shirt hasn't further shrunk in all the other times it's been through my wash, so the odds of me changing my laundry habits are slim to none. But maybe I'll think twice the next time I look at an item's fabric content and see that it's made entirely of rayon. Then again, whether or not I buy it will probably depend on nothing more than how cute it is...and whether it will still look cute with a bit of shrinkage.
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