To wonder how to stop my clothes shrinking in the wash?

[buzzheath]

I don't understand why this keeps happening. I wash clothes as recommended on the label. Underwear in particular shrinks a lot - but surely underwear has to be washed at 40C? I buy cotton, linen, viscose, polyamide.

What am I doing wrong? Does anyone else find this and how do you solve it?

I only ever wash our clothes on a 20 wash, they’re not dirty enough to need anything hotter than that. I pull viscose back into shape before air drying and ironing. I’ve never managed to shrink anything.

It is weird, OP - I used to be able to wash all my wool jumpers in our old washing machine at 40, and it was fine. But our new one shrunk several at the same temperature.

My daughter who's a textile designer told me that it's not just temperature - wool and cashmere and possibly some other fabrics can shrink due to being agitated. The programme on the new machine might be more violent I suppose! I now have to handwash all my nice jumpers and I'm careful just to gently squeeze them but not get too rough.

Absolutely nothing wears clothes out like washing.

All my linen things are white so go in with all the other white stuff

Can I ask why you wash at such a high temperature?

And by linen are you referring to bedding, or linen clothing.

I live in a country where many people just wash everthing on cold. I think the only time I have used the 90 programme on my machine is when I am doing a machine clean.

Cold wash.

My machine (Miele) has temperatures of …

Cold
20 deg
30 deg
40 deg
50 deg
60 deg
75 deg
90 deg

All my clothes shrunk recently and I couldn’t figure it out, I was convinced it was a washing machine fault but then I weighed myself and it turned out they weren’t getting smaller, I was getting bigger

For clothes that aren't sweaty or grubby, I use a 30 deg fast wash. 20 deg on anything that looks like it might shrink.