How to Un-Shrink Your Clothes
I hardly ever forget to hang dry clothes... but towels are a completely different story and I find myself shrinking them time and time again. Recently, though, I discovered a magical potion t0 unshrink clothes! A few weeks ago, I was perusing the aisles of Trader Joe's, when I came upon a set of really gorgeous kitchen towels. They were blue and white with stripes in a tea towel fabric. SWOON, right? (I completely acknowledge that these statements are absolutely lame... but that's what being an adult is, right?) The directions said to wash them twice before use for softness, so I threw them in the washing machine, washed the load, and - as usual - forgot about them. When my husband came home he grabbed the load and threw it in the dryer... and that's how my gorgeous new kitchen towels shrunk before I even had a chance to use them. The dimensions of the towels were supposed to be 17x24... and you can see here that they shrunk quite a bit.
Because we are trying to cut our spending, I wanted to try to unshrink them before going out to purchase a new set. I remembered an old "trick" I heard about moisturizing conditioner and decided to give it a go. I put 3 TBSP of conditioner into a really large kitchen bowl (though you can use the sink... but mine is hardly ever clean). I filled the bowl with water, and stuck the towels in to soak for 30 minutes. 
After the 30 minutes, I removed the towels, wrung them out, and stretched them into shape for several minutes. 
Once stretched, I placed each one on a bath towel and rolled them up tightly to remove the excess water. Then I stretched them again and set them flat to dry. After they dried, I remeasured them and although they weren't 100% back to normal dimensions, I can't fault this method to un-shrink clothes because I didn't measure them before I washed them the first time... maybe they were a little short to begin with? Now they measure 16.5x23, which I feel is a great improvement from the shrinkage.
So tell me, do you have any unshrink tips?!
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