Forget late-night cram sessions and battling the “freshman 15” when you get to college.
Instead, the art of washing and drying clothes may be one of the skills newbie college students will have to master when they head off to college this fall.
So, it can’t hurt to try a little laundry 101 to make sure the red towels don’t take a spin with the whites and ruin the whole load.
Derisa Collymore, director of camp activities at Brenau University, said she fields questions all the time from college students wanting laundry tips. She said it starts with separating the loads.
“It’s just basically learning how to separate your clothes,” she said. “Learning that there are four loads — whites, brights, darks and lights.”
She added that lessons on bleach and soaps is a necessity.
“The basics of using bleach and nonchlorine bleach and learning how the different soaps work would be good,” Collymore said. “Because with the powder, you should probably put that in with the water and then liquid you can add pretty much any time.”
Some students, though, have a head start on their new weekly chore.
Veronica Leon, 18, a recent graduate at Gainesville High School, said she and a lot of her friends have always had to do their own laundry. And living in a house with two brothers and two sisters, she said, their mother started the kids doing their own laundry early.
“Probably (since I was) 10, I think. I’ve been doing it for a long time,” Leon said. “For a while mom was making us wash our own clothes, but now my brothers and sisters and I just kind of throw things in whenever we see them.”
And while that helps keep the pile of dirty clothes to a minimum, it also means there’s an occasional garment that gets, well, changed in the wash.
“That’s the clothes that go missing around here; we don’t know what happened to it,” she said, laughing. “Clorox is our worst enemy; it’s usually when we stick colored clothes in with the white stuff and it tends to (come out) all different colors.
“But everything else is not that easy to ruin.”