This post originally appeared on my other blog, Avidly Dreaming.

New year, new goals, new self-challenges…and already, new things learned. Since I hope I’ll be learning a lot of new things during this adventure, I decided to start special blog posts about “Things I’ve learned.” I’ll be interested to see how the list grows this year!

So, for this first “TIL” post, I have learned…

• When line-drying laundry, one must remember to take into account the size of one’s laundry lines. I’m so used to doing large loads of laundry, instead of smaller ones, but today when I went out to hang my first full load to line-dry, a fairly small load, as I started hanging I realized that I was going to run out of line room! Sure enough, several items had to end up hung in the bathroom to dry. Whoops.
• When line-drying laundry, one must plan ahead to wash laundry early enough in the day so that it gets enough hours of sun to fully dry. As I thought over what I needed to do today, I realized that laundry was on the list. “Oh good,” says I, “I can start my line-dry challenge!” I started doing other things, as I usually do laundry in the afternoon. Then I realized that I’d better do laundry first, the earlier the better, if I wanted to actually have time for the clothes to dry by sundown. No more doing laundry at 9 pm for me.
• Vinegar takes out clothing dye that bleeds onto other clothing. It might not work all the time, and it might only work with certain kinds of dyes & fabrics, I have no idea. All I know is that a few days ago, I tossed a pair of turquoise socks into my wash load; a new pair. Yeah, yeah, not too bright, huh? (Pardon the pun!) But I always use cold wash water, and I’ve not had anything bleed in so long that I can’t even remember when it ever did. But those socks? Ooooh heck yeah, they left their little turquoise footprints on several items of clothing—favorite items, and I was upset when I saw the damage. Roomie suggested a few things, then said to try vinegar, since it couldn’t hurt. I must have had a look on my face of “er, I’ll try actual soap, thanks” because she got a determined look on her face, grabbed the turquoise-spotted items, marched out to the garage sink, and proceeded to pour vinegar onto the offending dye stains. Sure enough, the color began coming out! She kept at it (as I joked about how an Aries can’t resist a challenge), and soon most of the dye was gone. Even out of the white material! She said to then try running the items through a short wash cycle with just vinegar in the water, so I tried that…and lo & behold, the items came out with not one bit of dye left! I already like to keep vinegar on hand for a bunch of uses (besides eating it, that is ), and now I add one more thing to my reasons-to-keep-vinegar list.

Now that laundry’s drying, time to move on to the rest of the day’s work list. Hope your day is productive, too!