I need to know, dammit. I need your advice. I don't know what to do. I'm lost.
I have a laundry basket that never gets emptied out, even though the contents are always clean. There are some socks going stag in the basket. A lot of socks. Approximately seven black socks, six tan socks, seven white socks, and a couple miscellaneous stragglers of other hues. Some are mine, some are Mr. Tangerine's, and some belong to Ben.
None of these socks have mates! But surely, I tell myself, they'll surface some day. They must be in the house somewhere. Probably just got nudged under a stack somewhere.
If I throw these ones away, you just know their mates will return to them, full of apologies for being gone so long, eager to make amends, desiring nothing more than riding into the sunset together whilst embracing my family's feet.
What to do?
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I can't vote in the poll because it asks what I do. I'm not the one who does the laundry. If it were up to me, I'd toss it in a week, but since my husband does the laundry and he never throws anything away, random socks ride around in laundry baskets for quite some time. Our daughter has adopted the "if they're both socks, it's a pair" approach, at least in the winter when her socks are covered by her clothes. If it were up to her she'd skip the whole thing and just wear flip-flops all the time.
We have a Lone Sock Pile in our linen cabinet . . . any time a lone sock turns up, it goes there to await reunification; we go through the pile intermittently to look for reunions.
Sock puppets. Totally. Then on a rainy day, put on a show.
(ps - Since I like to disclose and not come off as being shady, I've commented before a few times but with an alias. Now I use my real name but I don't want it tied to the alias. I know...complicated. We've emailed with each other in regards to the aofg...)
We keep a corkboard in the basement near the washer and dryer. Lone socks go up on the board and stay there until their mates are found. Or not found. Who cares! It's in the basement. Occasionally I throw out ones that have been up for a long time. It's a fairly good system.
Throw them out. If the mates show up, which they probably never will, then you can throw those out, too.
Have a contest to see which one is the "loneliest sock" and then set it up on a date with the ratty ass pair of underwear. Oh sure, it's a little rough around the edges, but it's experienced, and it's got a crotch of gold.
Yes, I'm in the "forever" camp at the right. Even dust balls have their uses, right?
My husband obviously has some sort of lethal knives on his heels, so manages to rub holes in his socks. I toss the sock with the hole, and keep the other, because I know soon he will have another sock with a hole, and *poof* a mate for the other sock! I guess it helps that he only has 3 types of socks. For some reason, the rest of the family's socks always come out even.
I keep them in the linen closet in a mesh lingerie bag that I store them in. When I buy socks, I buy more than one of the same pair, so when one gets a hole I have a replacement. In theory, anyway.
The only socks in this house that have mates are mine...and I don't wear them enough to mate them.
Everyone else in this house has socks that don't require mating. I buy them all new socks at the beginning of the school year. They are all the same. They are all white. They have different color Sharpie marker dots on the toes to mark whose size is whose. They are sorted by dots and never mated because it's unnecessary.
Therefore my sanity is saved. I bought enough socks for each of them to have a two week supply, then I do a big load of sock wash every two weeks...with bleach. Boy socks are gross.
I say to string a length of twine across the ceiling of your laundry area and clothespin the mateless socks on it. It's decorative and you can easily spot mates.
I recently bought PK a box of nine of these.
Bizarrely, although he insists on wearing mismatched socks, he *also* insists that they be "really" mismatched. In other words, a black one with spots does NOT go with a solid white one! It can ONLY go with a white one with STRIPES!
Sigh. I thought I had the answer there, but no.
This made me laugh, because yesterday morning, my sock-sorting system came into play. I usually know when I've lost a sock, either to wear & tear or to the washer/dryer in the laundry room (the latter is uncommon but it does happen). What does happen more often is that I wash only one sock (I missed the laundry basket, say). thus, I keep all socks, and eventually they all get washed and reunited. In the case of my purple socks, I had several pair, and it took awhile, but yesterday they all matched up again, for the first time in MONTHS.
I will also wear mismatched socks, so I keep odd ones. I particularly like tye-dyed socks, i should add (from Maggie's Organic), and they're easier to match up, I'm thinking (knockwood I haven't lost one yet).
I am disheartened. That giant stack atop the giant basket, The Zone of Forgotten Misfitting Clothes? I figured most of the lost socks had found their way into that Zone. This afternoon, I was motivated to sort and purge—no, I don't need baggy jeans shorts any more. No, I don't need those big khaki shorts overalls I bought during the postpartum period. (Why were those still in my house?!?)
I found lots of clothes to donate, lots of pants for Mr. Tangerine to try on (and probably donate), a fair amount of stuff to launder. BUT NO FUCKING SOCKS. No, wait, that's not quite true. I found three white socks THAT DO NOT MATCH ANYTHING IN THE BASKET OF LONELY SOCKS. How can this be??
Nobody in my house wears matched socks. As Steven Wright says, we go by thickness.
I have a cat that has adopted balled up socks as toys; he hauls them to his water dish, places them in his cave-cube, and takes them to bed with him.
I read somewhere (helpful, I know) that people who repair washing machines and dryers frequently find socks wrapped around the motor when they open a machine up. My family is not that concerned with matching socks. I suppose if you care enough you could put all socks and smallish garments in a lingerie bag so they stay together; if you care really deeply you could shell out to get a repairman to look into it (so to speak); or if you're crafty (and also still care deeply) you could figure out how to open the machine up yourself and see if anything is in it. Good luck.
Check your sheets. Every thin (read: not white) sock in this house gets static-stuck to the damned sheets. For some reason, I never see them when I *make* the beds, only when I pull out new sheets that have been stuck in the closet for 5 months.
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