Keeping Your Whites, WHITE
October 12, 2010
When we had our oldest, I used our rocking chair incessantly. It was cream colored and after several years of use, it was stained in so many places. It was a good quality chair and I didn’t want to toss it so I decided to have a slipcover made for it. I chose white fabric – I know, white in a kid’s room - but I just love how crisp, clean and classic white is.
I’ve used the chair for 10 months now, snuggling up with my baby before bedtime. Last week I noticed the cover had a few stains on it so it was time to peel it off and wash it. Not only did it have the normal dirty fingerprints but it also had dried milk from spilled bottles and denim rub off from my new jeans. I’d like to think that I would wash my slipcovers every month or so but let’s face it – not at the top of my ‘to do’ list. So it had been a few months and I was worried those stains weren’t coming out.
I hosed the slipcover down with my new favorite stain remover, poured some chlorine-free bleach in for good measure and threw it in the wash on cold.
Not bad for Round 1 – all the fingerprints and blue jean stains came out. It was the milk that didn’t come out, something I didn’t expect.
On Round 2, I followed the same steps with the stain remover on the milk only, a couple ounces of chlorine-free bleach but I used warm water this time.
And it worked. Perfectly white slipcover again.
