Care/Cleaning for Sweaters in General

Never, hang sweaters on hangers like you would a shirt or jacket.  Sweaters are heavy and its weight dangling from a hanger will pull a sweater out-of-shape.  Additionally, the hanger ends will cause little dimples/dents to appear on the shoulder tops, which are quite unsightly when the hanger is removed, and difficult to fix. 

Metal hangers rust, and rust stains are nearly impossible to remove from sweaters. If you feel you must store a sweater on a hanger, use a wooden hanger, fold the sweater lengthwise, then drape the folded sweater over the bottom bar of the hanger. If I hang sweaters from a hanger, here's how I do it.

Store sweaters in a cool environment, in something that can breathe, like a zippered sweater bag you can get from most department stores.  I like to toss a scented dryer sheet into the bag as well.  The scent makes the sweater smell nice, seems to prevent mold spores and keeps most pests away. Another option is using small bags of cedar wood chips, but they can be a bit pricey and need replacing annually.

Don't use mothballs.  They keep moths away, but it's extremely hard to get the mothball smell out of sweaters.

There are different methods of dry cleaning, and it’s difficult for a customer to tell the difference.  When using a dry cleaner, you want to avoid three types:

• Green solutions:  The “green” solutions are environmentally friendly, but simply don’t clean very well.
• Perk (Perchloroethylene): This process is very harsh on the fibers, and over time removes the luster from nice sweaters. 
• Dryel (and other home drycleaning products):  Not sure how these products are supposed to work, but my experience has been that I couldn’t tell any difference before and after cleaning a sweater with these products.

If you’re going to use a professional dry cleaner, I’d recommend one that uses the hydrocarbon method.

The best cleaning solution I’ve found is “Eucalan” wool cleaner.  It comes  different scents; I prefer the  Eucalyptus version.  Eucalan is available at amazon.com. You use this product much like Woolite, but Eucalan is much gentler on fibers than Woolite.

If I've got a few or several sweaters to clean, I use the washing machine tub without turning it on.

• Half-fill (or less, if fewer sweaters) the tub with cool or lukewarm water. 
• Pour in an appropriate amount of Eucalan
• Let the sweaters soak for about 15 minutes. 
• Hand-kneed the sweaters by reaching into the tub and squeezing the water through the garments. Ensure you squeeze all parts of the sweaters; you really can't overdue this phase. The more you squeeze the cleaner the sweaters.
• Advance the dial to the final spin cycle - you want to avoid the rinse cycle as the Eucalan is designed to leave a protective coating behind on the fibers. Spinning the sweaters in the washer will force the vast majority of the water out of the sweaters. They may be a bit misshapen from the spinning, so don't leave them setting like that for long.
• Take each damp sweater and roll it in a towel on the floor. Walk along the rolled towel, forcing the remaining water out of the sweaters and into the towel. Remove the towels.
• Lay the sweaters out to dry, preferably flat - away from direct sunlight. Reshape the sweaters as necessary while they are still damp. They make sweater drying screens for this that lets air circulate all around, or just periodically flip them over. 

Also, another trick for bringing the life back to angora, is to place it in a paper bag with the opening closed, and leave it in the freezer overnight.  Does wonders for angora.