Hanging laundry is a feat of engineering

If you were to talk to some random people you might meet out and about, you could discover that there are a few different ways to dry your clothes.

1. You can put it in a dryer and let modern technology take care of all the hard work.
2. You can hang your clothes up on a clothesline, either outside or inside.
3. You could leave your clothes in a wet pile and pray that they dry before any mold starts to grow.

I suppose if you want to be nitpicky, you could also set your clothes on fire, but while that may dry them out they would not be useable afterwards. We’ll ignore that.

Really, I just want to talk about the second method: Hanging your clothes out to dry. It can be a feat of engineering to hang everything in such a way that you use the least number of clothespins, get the most articles of clothing to hang, and also manage to dry all of said articles of clothing in an allotted amount of time.

By hanging laundry next to one another and sharing clothespins at the corners, you can reduce the number of clothespins that you require to hang the same amount of clothing. By doubling up on both sides of the line, you can further reduce the number of clothespins that are required while also fitting more clothes in the same length of line.

The trick, though, is doubling up in a way that will allow the clothes to still dry. Backing a pair of jeans and a heavy towel, for example, means that the outside of both will probably dry, but the inside will still be damp or even wet when you go to pull them down.

I have found that putting socks next to one another works out quite well, and that can be done in between the legs of a hanging pair of jeans. Why leave part of the line under-utilized, after all? Thin t-shirts can also be backed, although you may be better off staggering them so that you can get a little airflow in between them.

It is also helps if you pay attention to the weather. If you do not notice that it is raining outside, chances are that any clothes hanging out there will have difficulty drying.