After your kid-size shirt comes out of the dryer, you might consider tossing it as your newest cleaning rag. Fortunately, there’s a good chance you can save your broken-in clothing – the process takes about an hour and all you need is a few household hair products and a towel. Here’s how to revive your accidental crop top from its shrinkage.
How is it possible to de-shrink your clothes?
Of course, shrunk clothes are no accident: when your clothes get wet, they fill with water and stretch the threads, and as soon as they are in the dryer, the fabric thread begins to pucker and dry more firmly than before in the laundry. It is that expand and contract This turns a normal sized shirt into a crop top. The best way to reverse the process is to loosen the fabric and stretch the coiled threads.
You can loosen up your cotton clothesbut there are options Shrink clothing made from all fabrics and blends. The process I recently did was soaking a shirt in conditioner, then gently ringing it and pulling it back into shape.
Here’s what you need:
- A bucket
- Conditioner or baby shampoo
- hot water
- A big towel
How to stretch your shrunk clothes back into shape
First fill the bucket with lukewarm water, then use your hair conditioner (a washout is best, as leave-in conditioner could leave too much residue). You can also use Baby shampoo if you want to be particularly tender.
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TikToker Armen Adamjan recommends on his creative_explained Canal to use a cup of conditioner, but I found this way too much and ended up using about two-thirds of a cup … which still felt overkill. In the end, I would only recommend half a cup with a full bucket of water so your clothes don’t get slimy. Add the conditioner, then use a whisk or something similar to stir it into the water until it is a cloudy white color. Soak the clothes in the solution, gently massage the water through the cloth and squeeze it out. Then let the garment soak for 30 minutes.
After soaking, take it out of the bucket – but don’t rinse it completely (although I did wash off some of the excess rinse which was fine). Gently squeeze out the water as you pull your item out of the bucket, but you don’t want to let it ring as twisting would likely end up with pretty badly shaped clothing. Instead, squeeze out as much water as you can, then place the garment on your dry towel. Roll the item up in the towel and press as hard as you can to remove the excess water.
Then the fabric should feel damp but not soaked. Then you can gently stretch the fabric to mimic its original shape and size and lay it flat on another towel to dry. To prevent the material from curling up again, you can also place heavier objects, such as books or paperweights, on top of the clothing so that it does not slip. It dries unwrapped (or at least much less wrapped) and with a little luck you can wear your favorite shirt again.
