Your Clothespins Can Tell You When to Do Laundry

This is a safe space where you can admit you don’t wash every article of clothing every time you wear it. In fact, it’s a space where we can celebrate your decision to waste less water and not traumatize your fabric’s delicate fibers. The thing about not washing clothes after every wear, though, is that it can be hard to remember which items you’ve already worn once or twice. Piling them up on a chair is no good, as that just clutters your space, but continually putting them back in a drawer or closet after each wear makes it impossible to remember when it’s time to toss them in the wash.

This tip has been floating around Facebook for a few days after a user first posted it in a decluttering group. She said that while sorting her late mother’s artifacts, she came across her method for remembering which clothes she’d worn and washed—and it was simple.

“She numbered clothes pins and would put them on the hanger of an item she wore. Once she wore it 3 times…in the wash it went,” she said, adding a photo of a hanger full of clothespins numbered between one and three.

When you wear an article of clothing and put it back on its hanger or in the drawer, you just attach one of the clothespins. You can even skip the numbering system as long as you remember that one pin equals one wear. Once a single piece of clothing has accumulated three pins, you wash it and start over. Simply store all your marking pins on a separate hanger at the end of your closet rod.

If you want to start getting rid of clothes you don’t need, consider going through your closet and drawers at the end of each month (or each season) and take note of which pieces have no clothespins. If an article has no pins on it, and you can’t remember washing it recently, that might mean it’s just not a major part of your rotation and you should consider donating it. Put it in a “purgatory” for a month with the rest of the stuff you might be ready to toss out and see how you feel without it.