I’ve been doing my own laundry for more than a few years now, and this just occured to me. I ran my white bedsheets through the dryer, and the lint was the same blue-grey color as the lint from my other, multicolored laundry loads. It was just a tad lighter.
So, how does the lint from a set of white bedsheets turn out about the same color as a load of laundry that includes BDUs and blue jeans?
I have red sheets and when I launder them, the lint is actually the reddish color. And they’re fairly old, so it’s not just the dye coming out.
Because you roughly was the same clothes over and over.
When I dry a load of whites, the lint is… …white.
When I do the standard load of tees and sox-it’s white. If it’s a load of flannel sheets, the lint is equivalent to the base sheet color.
Sometimes there’s a little lint still in the pipes, so to speak. On my machine if I washed something dark blue, then something white, the lint from the white load would be very light blue. If I did another load of whites, the lint would be nearly pure white. It sounds like your dryer just retains a little more lint than mine and so the color averages out.
I was watching a video on artists using off-beat media and one man used dryer lint. Sometimes it took a lot of fiddling to get just the right mix. If he wished a pure red lint, it usually took a minimum of two loads to acheive.
Mine is definitely not. Red loads have red lint. White loads have white lint. All others have greyish-blue lint.
This makes sense.
Well since I wash my clothes together, both whites and darks… my laundry comes out greyish… sorry, no help to the OP, but I did have to put in my 2 cents.
In the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! museum on Hollywood Boulevard, there is a full-size portrait of John Wayne made entirely out of dryer lint.
You can find a picture of it in the vault at Ripleys.com.
The artists name is Slater Barron, who is currently a college art professor, in Long Beach, CA I think. I think Professor Barron would definitely beg to differ with the premise of this OP.
You’ve aleady gotten the answer, but here it is again: The lint is going to mirror, roughly, the color of the laundry. It’s kind of like starting an sdmb thread, in that instead of matching what you thought you put in, you’re putting in something else, something you never thought of, something that is nonetheless going to lay claim to your name and posture, and which will leave you only when you sacrifice more than a modicum of dignity for the privilege of standing tall, wit your friends, at the gate. Grrrr.
Read the filter, young one. Then Clean It. Then replace it. Then read it as often as you please, provided that you clean it when needed. W-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!
Dryer lint is, in my experience, the same rouglhly blue-grey-purple colour as a crowded stadium photographed from a reasonable distance. I think there’s a connection there.