How do you sort out socks in your household?

[cheapskatemum]

I know which are mine, but DH and DSs 1, 2 & 3 all have similarly-sized feet. After washing all the socks I struggle to work out which are whose. I can't spread them all out & say "pick out your own" because DS1 is acquisitive, DH proprietal & DS2 is autistic (& would end up with none). As for DS3, he'd just get bolshy if DS1 got there first. Thank goodness DS4's feet are significantly smaller AS YET! So, how do you manage?

could you buy different colours, patterns, stipes,labels or ribbed socks for each of them to save on the confusion?

Mine all have different colour/types of socks. For example DD1 has dark blue check on her school socks. DD2 has light blue. DS1 black school socks. DS2 grey.
It would be a nightmare if they all wore similar colours.

I do washing for 7, mainly do it numerically, i.e. four pairs per person. It doesn't really seem to matter who gets which incredibly similar grubby white pair as we now all fall into just two sizes/categories - male large and female medium.

take a look here
there isn't 2 pairs the same!
ps love the leg warmers and chunky knits!

We don't. we leave them in a pile and then they breed and mutate into Darwinian variety and we hopelessly rifle through the pile for a pair with no luck so we abandon them to colonise a corner of the house and go to Tescos and buy more and feel interminable guilt at all the poor sockless children making them in the third world.

And then we go and have a lie down.

buy dh black, ds1 blue, ds2 breen, ds3 grey.

viola!

I keep trying to institute a one-person, one-colour strategy but DH is resisting it.

He just buys more fecking socks.

DH and I have a sock drawer into which all our socks go. We share.

Strangely I have a pair of black and red spotty socks which have rebelled against my slattern tendancies and have stubbornly remained a pair for, wait for this, 19 years. I think they have a life of their own.

I distinctly remember wearing them to school under my school trousers. They are very magic socks I think and I keep hoping the magic will wear off on the 7893725893289 odd socks in our drawer.

Juat noticed this is in the larger families section. Feel a fraud now as I just have the one DS.

I give all white socks to dd2 (she is 8) and for some strange reason she loves sorting the socks into pairs! then splits them between herself and dd1, ds1 has dark coloured socks, dd3 and ds2 are still little and have brightly coloured socks. dp has black socks, and i have trainer socks,

We used to have a nightmare here....i have 5 boys and 1 girl that need grey or black school socks.

Ds1 & Dd1 have roughtly same size feet so they are sharing plain black socks.

DS2 is wearing navy socks until he gets caught...lol

DS3 has light grey socks from M&S which have the sizes inside the sock (a genious idea)

DS3&4 have the dark grey M&S socks with their sizes in....

the white sports socks are the biggest problem...DP wears these too....i just team them up and hope for the best .

we just have communal socks which I dish out willy nilly really. ds1 gets his own socks (as I have 3 girls after him), but the girls is more hit and miss.

One tip - M&S mark the sizes on the ribbed bits of their socks, so I can tell which white or black socks belong to which child.

oh I didn't read your post idobelieve! (re M&S socks).

Thanks for all your ideas. I have tried the different patterns idea, but all need to wear black - some days I struggle to discriminate black & navy anyway! It is the white sports socks that are the biggest problem. I think they all have different logos/height/ribbing, but I can't remember which is whose.

We all wear plain black. I sew a couple of stitches in each sock with different coloured thread. So Blue for DH, Pink for DD, etc. Just a couple of small stitches so they aren't noticeable and the kids actually like to do their own.

try this

Dad and my 3 brothers all had very similar sized feet so Mum put a basket in the bathroom and they helped themselves. That only left mine and hers which where smaller. The boys socks where replaced regularly.

Thanks for the sock porn KisdRus

drool

Stuff the ever growing mountain of 'odd' ones in a bag and every now and then try to do a matching session - hate plain navy and black and grey!

dp does it!

I sort them into heaps of

• mens

• ones with lacy bits on top

• knee length ones

• colourful ones

• ones which don't seem to go in any other category

I match just enough pairs to give me hope, and leave the carefully sorted heaps on the spare room bed for weeks till I can steel myself to admit defeat and hurl the whole damn lot back in a laundry basket.

wear tights

5 boys makes it a bit of a job!

OOh sorry - shame they are not Tudors - just watching that. You could move to Hebden Bridge - a friend moved there because an estate agent told her it was the kind of town where it doesn't matter if your children go to school in odd socks. This was top of her requirements when house hunting. I'm not joking!

i am not too far away!