Have you ever been in this situation: there is two minutes to get out the door and you can not find a matching pair of socks for you or your family to wear? Frustrating? Oh yeah. I have been using a method to fight this lost sock issue; it is the lost sock bag.

Step 1: Materials

All you need for this is:

-a plastic bag (you may prefer to upgrade to a nicer hanging bag, but I try to reuse these plastic bags as much as possible)
-some place to hang up the plastic bag like a cupboard door, coat hanger, or hat hook.

Step 2: Strategy for Capturing Lost Socks

Lost socks do not just appear or disappear; they actually tend to get mixed into different loads of laundry and then never paired up. And, odds are, they end up in different drawers or cupboards making matching them next to impossible. So here is the strategy for capturing lost socks.

1. When finished folding your laundry, put all lost socks in the lost socks bag; not with the rest of your laundry to be put away.

2. When you are initially starting this strategy, go through your drawers and find single "lost" socks, put them in the bag (launder them if they are dirty). If you stick to this strategy, you should only have to do this once.

3. In the next load of laundry, just dump the lost sock bag in the clean load of laundry.

4. Repeat steps 1 and 3 forever.

5. Pretty soon, your lost sock bag should only have socks where the partner is truly lost and a few that cycle through every now and then. Welcome to the rest of your life.