When you wash a duvet cover, why does other washing end up in it? (continued)
Jill Breivik, Balbriggan, Co. Dublin, Ireland
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I believe the answer to this puzzle is in the washing machine, not the duvet cover or even the socks.
My late washing machine 鈥� a famous sock-eater 鈥� often turned the duvet cover inside out and, in the process, engulfed every other item in the drum. The result was a huge lump of fabric that was almost impossible to get out.
When that machine finally passed away, it was replaced with a new electronic one that has utterly failed to leave the duvet cover anything other than lying idly among the other laundry, regardless of whether it is inside out or not. Washing day is calmer, but a little dull.
Peter Slessenger, Reading, Berkshire, UK
It isn鈥檛 just duvet covers that surround other items in the washing machine. When I wash a flat sheet, the other items in the wash sometimes end up in a bundle completely enveloped by the sheet. None of my pillowcases seem to ingest anything. Perhaps they are too small for solid food.
Charlie Wartnaby, Cambridge, UK
This weekend, not only did our elderly duvet cover ingest every other item in the wash, it engulfed the remainder of itself, leaving a poorly spun wet object resembling a giant apple. Its only orifice was a taut, inwardly sucked whorl of its own fabric, resembling a navel.
It was so tightly closed thanks to the friction of the sopping fabric that we couldn鈥檛 get it undone, so we had to resort to tearing it open to free the rest of the wash.
Paul Coyne, Glasgow, UK
This issue has bothered me for years. The best answer I can find is that there is some probabilistic threshold at play. In randomly placed washing churning around in a machine, there is a probability that something will end up enclosed in a duvet cover. I assume that the probability that an item inside will then migrate to the outside is slightly lower.
This, I surmise, is because a sock outside a duvet cover has many directions in which it can move relative to the cover. An item inside the duvet cover, on the other hand, has to move in a specific direction in order to escape.
鈥淎 duvet cover doesn鈥檛 behave like a black hole for washing. Its opening is no event horizon, but both entrance and exit鈥�
David Muir, Edinburgh, UK
I carried out some tests to investigate this phenomemon. I put 10 assorted socks in the washing machine with a duvet cover on a low-temperature cycle, and then repeated this five times. The duvet cover trapped an average of 4.6 socks. When I carried out this test with the socks placed inside the cover at the outset, an average of 5.6 socks escaped.
Despite urban myths, a duvet cover doesn鈥檛 behave like a black hole for washing. Its opening is no event horizon, but instead both entrance and exit.
Brian King, Barton on Sea, Hampshire, UK
I thought that it was well known that duvet covers were textiferous (the textile equivalent of a carnivore).
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