DIY Laundry Stain Remover

{I’m going to go ahead and put a disclaimer at the beginning of my post, because let’s face it.  Yes, Cage Free Dad is awesome and helps with laundry.  Don’t hate me!}

Now, on to the topic at hand today.  Last week, Cage Free Dad was helping with laundry (see? I said don’t hate me!) and accidentally left a tube of Chapstick in one of his pants pockets.  Ooops! If you’ve ever done that yourself, you know the stains it can leave.  Unfortunately, he chose this cycle to add Pistache’s brand new t-shirts, so everything that is new to this season now has these nice grease stains all over them.

In a panic, I went to my mom friends for help, and got a few different suggestions, ranging from chalk to Blue Dawn.  Since I already had some Blue Dawn dish soap, I decided to look up how to remove stains using it.  After reading several posts about different ways it can help, I concocted a stain remover that I am really pleased with, so I thought I’d share it with you now.

Please note, this is not something you can mix up and keep on hand.  You’ll have to make it every time you have stains to remove, because otherwise the magical properties the Hydrogen Peroxide with dissipate.

What You’ll Need:

• Blue Dawn dish soap
• Hydrogen Peroxide
• Baking solda
• teaspoon sized measuring spoon
• small bowl for mixing

The Recipe

To make your stain remover simply follow this recipe:

Use 1 teaspoon of Dawn and mix it with 2 teaspoons of Hydrogen Peroxide.  If you want to make more or less of this stain remover, simply use the 2:1 ratio.  Once you’ve mixed those 2 ingredients in your bowl, add some baking soda to form a paste.

Let it Sit

For best results, use your stain remover immediately by rubbing it into the stains on your clothes.  For Pistache’s t-shirts, I let them sit about an hour (I tested this on one of my older shirts first to make sure I wasn’t further ruining her clothes, you should do the same).  After the hour is up, I washed the clothes on a normal cycle and then laid them flat to dry.  This is important since putting clothes in the dryer can set the stain even further.

Pistache’s clothes had already been through the dryer with the stain once, so I didn’t want to do it again.  Most of the stains came out on the first try, but a few pieces still had visible stains.  For those, I simply mixed up another stain remover and repeated the process again.  Depending on how important this article of clothing is to you, you can repeat this process as many times as needed. Unfortunately, one of the new t-shirts did end up in the play clothes drawer after the second attempt at removing the stain, but all others look brand new again.

While I’ve only used this stain remover on grease stains so far, the reading I did online showed that other bloggers have used their Blue Dawn stain removers on a variety of different stains with success, so it is certainly worth a shot.  I know I’ll be trying this concoction first from now on on any stains that come my way.

 

 

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