Fight Lost Socks With the Lost Sock Bag

Intro: Fight Lost Socks With the Lost Sock Bag

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.

Comments

[Lori5000]

I taught everyone to use safety pins. They pin each pair together, put in the laundry basket, I wash, dry, unpin, and put away. I have a sock bag as well, but the pin system forces everyone to "look" for their 2 socks before putting them in the laundry.

[KJsJoys]

I used to use expensive "Sock-Locks" but something faster, easier and cheaper is those little colorful rubber bands that kids use on their Rainbow Looms (available everywhere). And yes, only "locked" socks should go into the laundry. I keep a lost sock bag too. If you have either enough family members or enough socks you can also do "sock only" laundry loads too. Then you aren't picking them out of other clothes, towels, etc.

[hammer9876]

My lost socks were always either in the sleeves of a long-sleeved t-shirt or in the elastic corner of fitted sheets. They could be there for months on end before being found depending on the weather (long sleeves only worn in the winter) or which set of sheets get used. I am with jdege. I buy socks in bulk all the same color. Life it too short to have to match socks and people get so uptight when you purposely wear mismatched socks. Like who fricken cares? Apparently everyone does! Try it some day. EVERYONE will give you a hard time!

[michianadolls]

Our sock basket is hanging next to the dryer, same idea. Mother of three children and had enough with matching socks, and gloves too. It cut down on a lot of matching time by assigning colors to certain children based on their fave colors. Child 1 has all pink and purple socks, Child 2 loves green, Child 3 has all black. Orange socks were too hard to find, but when we did...they were his. My socks were grey.

[lemonie]

All my socks are black, and I don't care whether they're paired or not. However, if you do I like the method you've got. Short of traveling through a black hole to find where all the lost socks end-up this is a good one.

L

[indivara]

You are lucky. Even my black socks are a different color. You know what I mean, not a different color actually... a they are a slightly different shade, and look the same indoors, but are visibly different when worn outside X-(

[NoBonus]

Black socks are the hardest; that is why the sock bag method really works for me; I can match a whole bunch of singles together and really make sure I get a perfect match.

[lemonie]

What would be cool (and expensive) would be to RFID each sock and pair them up using a scanner and database? L

[NoBonus]

Hahahaha! It would be a real Rube Goldberg!

[lemonie]

Nah Rube Goldberg / Heath Robinson would involve physical tags and a card-index or something...

I was thinking of one of these but I forget how much they cost.

L

[jdege]

I never seem to have this problem. Of course, when I buy socks, I buy half-a-dozen pairs of exactly the same kind I did the last time I bought socks. All of my socks match. (Style? Who needs style?)

[NoBonus]

There are a lot of people at our place with all different kinds of socks, so this was a solution that has saved a lot of money on new socks.