When your clothes have been washed remove them from the ‘rinsing zone’ and lay them out flat on a towel. You can wash all your laundry using Woolite if you want to, though it doesn’t have the stain removal properties of some regular detergents.

For example, your clothes should be protected from general wear and tear issues like thinning, bobbling and fraying for longer if you use Woolite. But water alone won’t be able to clean your laundry thoroughly, and it certainly won’t be able to lift away any stains. Soak the garment for 10 or 15 minutes without moving or agitating it. Then remove the water and refill the tub or sink to rinse the garment. However, in some cases you will need to buy a more specialised detergent that suits the material you’re cleaning, like a wool detergent. These types of detergents are sometimes known as delicate detergents.

You can follow the steps above to hand wash silk items. However, you need to do a colourfast test first. Year after year your knitwear will feel and look great. This wool wash keeps the fuzzy bits down and the shape looking just as good as the day you bought your favourite jumper. No matter how delicate the clothes are that you need to wash, Clothes Doctor has you covered.

So, if you were to buy this giant bottle, not only would you get ample washes from the tub, but you’d also be doing your bit for the environment. Laundry soaps are an excellent alternative to bottles of liquid detergent and powders because they are more compact in size, and they can be transported around with you, so you can pop them in your luggage when travelling.What’s even better is that you don’t need boiling water to see the effects this product has on clothes, it can be used to clean laundry in low temperature water. This is ideal, especially when you are hand washing garments. If we had to recommend just one detergent for washing wool, it would be Ecover Delicate Laundry Liquid for Wool & Silk. It’s eco-friendly and cruelty free, and has been approved by the The Woolmark Company as suitable for wool. It also has a lovely waterlily and honeydew scent. However, there is an excellent no-rinse wool wash detergent that many people have had success with. The recipe calls for:

If you’ve got a couple of items to wash, it might take half an hour or so. But obviously the more laundry you have, and the more diverse your piles of dirty clothes are, the longer it’ll take you to treat and clean each individual item of clothing. What happens if you don’t use laundry detergent when hand washing? This, in turn, should prevent you from tipping too much of the detergent into the water in one go, and it ought to stop the watery mixture from becoming overly concentrated. It’s not quite as simple as that because there’s a lot of preparation, and thinking ahead, involved when it comes to washing clothes by hand. So, let’s find out what washing clothes by hand really entails!Remember that you’ll actually be putting your hands in the water to clean your clothes, so make sure the water isn’t too hot for you. The plant-based, biodegradable formula comes in a liquid form, and thoroughly cleans stains from clothes, as well as being gentle on the delicate fibres of the materials you intend on cleaning. It’s also safe to use if you have a septic tank in your home, which is a bonus! Others use distilled white vinegar. These methods are fairly straightforward. Add a cup of white vinegar to a bowl of warm water or a few drops of shampoo.

The only clothes that you shouldn’t really hand wash, or wash in a washing machine, are items that are ‘dry clean only’. These clothes should be, as the name suggests, dry cleaned. When it comes to drying woollen clothes, you need to remove the item from the water and lay it out flat on a towel. Then you need to roll the woollen item up in the towel to extract liquid from it. It can then be left on a flat surface to dry naturally. Pre-treatments should be done before the hand washing takes place – this’ll help to give your clothes the best overall clean.Keep in mind that you might need to wash a single piece of underwear at a time, you’ll need to use hot water, and you might need to leave the underwear to soak in detergent lined water for an hour or so, just to give them a thorough clean. Make sure the washing up liquid is well diluted—the method linked to above only recommends using one tablespoon of washing up liquid in a big tub of water.