Now that the weather is nice, we’ve been line-drying most of our clothes here at Chez Whatsit. The shirts and jeans don’t turn out too badly, because denim isn’t the softest fabric to start with. But the towels! My God, the towels! They come off the line like boards. Seriously. I have to give them a good hard snap just to get them to relax enough to lie in the laundry basket. I could injure a small child if I tossed one of these things like a Frisbee.
Why does air-drying that makes the texture so stiff and unpleasant? I don’t use fabric softener sheets when I tumble-dry them, so fabric softener isn’t the difference. What is it about a tumble in the dryer that makes clothes, particularly towels, so much softer?
A tumble drier tumbles them. You need a good brisk breeze to get things on the clothesline to flapping.
But the sheets just smellllllll so goooooooood. Here’s what I do: dry everything but towels on the line. Cardboard towels? No thanks. My dad dried Everything on the line. Wintertime too. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried to dry your backside with a frozen towel. 
I’ve dried some clothes indoors on a wire rack, and they get a bit stiff but not as much as something on a clothesline. I think the direct solar radiation and relatively dry air combine to knock all the water out so fast the cloth fibers don’t have a chance to relax at all. Compare that with the air in your dryer, which stays pretty humid for a lot of the cycle. Even near the end when the water has mostly passed out the exhaust, all that tumbling keeps the fibers from getting stiff.
I have noticed this too. With reagrd to towels, you might want to consider two things:
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The type of towel. There are differences between towels, some seem to go much more rigid and abrasive than others. I have not studied this in a rigorous scientific controlled study, (hangs head in shame), but some towels with a deeper ‘pile’ do much better. After some experimatation we have found towels which dry outdoors to a mere ‘remove-top-surface-of-skin’ level.
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How dry the towels are when you hang them out. If you have a washing machine with a very high spin cycle speed they are drier when you hang them out and this can make a difference to their abrasiveness too.
On the subject of towels I have heard that you should never treat them with fabric conditioner. This stuff coats the fibres of the towel and cuts down on their absorbency. Could this also be adding to the rough feel of towels when they are line dried?
Huh? Give me line-dried fabric over tumble-dried any day! Much fresher feeling, smells gorgeous and better for the environment. (Tumble driers EAT electricity)
Yeah, in theory I’d agree, but in practice, well, my mother line dries her towels to save money on electricity.
I guess line-dried towels are probably a pretty good exfoliant, though. Wasn’t no dead skin left on my body by the time I dried off with one of them.
soap residue leaves line-dried clothes stiffer. Use less soap or extra rinse cycles.
Good tip, re soap residue. I do try to use the minimum possible amount of detergent, but I’ve found that oddly, when I use too little detergent, I get lint everywhere. So it’s a fine balance.
As I said earlier, I don’t use fabric softener anyway, so that’s not an issue.
And even though the towels feel like cardboard, I’m willing to put up with it because it saves mucho electricity. MrWhatsit does occasionally sneak them into the dryer for a quick 10-minute tumble sometimes, though, which I’m basically OK with.
Related question: can you line dry clothes in winter? I’m guessing that because the sun isn’t as warm and the daylight hours are shorter, you can’t get away with line drying three loads of laundry in one day like you can right now. But can you dry one? What about if it’s freezing? This is the first year we’ve lived in a place that had a spot for a clothesline, so this is all new to me.
The spin-dry cycle of a washing machine causes a towel’s raised fibers to mat together. Tumble drying unmats the fibers, while line-drying leaves them matted (unless a stiff breeze unstiffens the towels by causing them to flap around).
My basement is filled with many clotheslines and bars for hang drying clothes. I’m just so tired of everything shrinking in the dryer. After hang drying for a day I do throw them in the dryer on low heat to soften them up and take out the wrinkles.
Just pop your line dried stuff in the dryer on no-heat fluff for a couple of minutes after you take them off the line. It softens them up, yet doesn’t use much electricity since they’re already dry and you aren’t using heat. Plus, they still have that great “dried outdoors” smell.