Tonight I anointed my sweater with the kiss of ketchup. Lots of ketchup. This is my second favorite sweater so I wasn’t too pleased. In a lot of cleaning handbooks and guides there’s this guide to stain removal that is a bunch of arcane wizardry and mystical chanting, more or less ordering you to go and buy:
acetone
vinegar
chalk
stain removal fluids of various make
stain removal pens
rubbing alcohol
club soda
oxygen bleach
other bleach
a time machine
an entire cow
Which is fantastic and all but here’s my method.
Step 1: Mess up a fabric item with something
Step 2: Wipe off most of it with a paper towel
Step 3: Wet down either a bar of soap or the item itself, and then scrub at the item with the bar of soap til each fiber is soaped, or something like that. If it’s really bad, get the other side too.
Step 4: Wipe down the stains with liquid soap
Step 5, most importantly: Shove it in a laundry basket and wait a bit, at least an hour, before you run it through the usual laundering. The dryer will cook the stains in there if they haven’t come out after laundering, which is why it’s harder to remove stains that have already claimed their territory on your clothes after it’s been laundered; I do not know how to get rid of those.
Should work on most stains before they get set in.
Update from 1/23/25: Yes it worked on the sweater quite well. It should work on many other stains. I’ve also learned that baby wipes help to prevent stains also when used right away after sopping up any liquids. Handy since they’re more portable
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