Organizing Your Clothing

When your blind or have little usable vision finding clothes can be a nightmare if you don’t take steps to label everything or come up with a system that works best for you.  A lot of people label their clothing with the colour brailed and sewn onto the tag, or by sewing buttons of different shapes onto the tag.  This requires a fair amount of work and can cause irritation if sewn onto the side of the tag that touches your skin.

There are many options out there, but the trick is to find one that works for each individual.  I prefer to hang most of my clothes instead of storing them in drawers.  This makes it easier to find what I’m looking for because I don’t have to rummage through drawers and it gives me a chance to know exactly what I have.

I don’t just hang my clothes up any which way either.  I sort them by colour and also by type.  It may seem a bit like overkill, but it only takes a few minutes to start and as long as you keep hanging things in the right place it takes no work at all to keep up.  It also saves a lot of time!

I hang clothes by type from left to right starting with shirts, then pants, skirts, dresses and finally jackets and coats.  This way I can jump directly to the section of what I’m looking for and avoid having to search through what I’m not.

Each of these sections are also organized by colour, from light to dark.  I use white, yellow, orange, pink, red, purple, blue, green, brown, grey, and black.  This is a natural progression from one colour to another.  If an article of clothing has more than one colour it gets hung with the colour it has the most of.  If it has an equal amount of different colours it gets hung with the darkest of the colours because this is usually the most prominent.

You could take this a step further by cutting plastic lids and brailing them with each colour before adding them to the rod in your closet, but I don’t do this.  It wouldn’t really work for me because I can’t reach that far even if I did still have enough feeling in my hands to read braille.

For smaller items such as socks you could organize them in your drawer by colour, or even fold the pairs together and keep them in bags or containers labeled with the colours.  If you have a set of mesh bags for your dirty socks you can keep them separated throughout the whole process by putting your dirty socks into the correct bag, dropping it in to the washer and dryer and putting the dried socks back into the drawer.  This cuts valuable time off of your morning that you could use to sleep in, or even slow down and enjoy your breakfast a little more!  It also makes the piles of clothes laying around the room vanish because you don’t have to pull them out to search through them anymore.

What types of tips do you have for organizing clothes?