It’s the new year and the holidays are over. Although your Christmas and New Year celebration may not be as busy because of social distancing, you probably had a lot of cooking and eating done. If there’s anything you can’t avoid in such activities, it’s the occasional stain. You’re bound to smear or spill food, drinks and even paints and dyes on surfaces and clothes.
The difficulty of removing these stains depends entirely on the material that caused them and what your surface or clothing is made of. If a simple trip to the washing machine and dryer won’t do, you’ll need smarter and more extreme measures to take care of those nasty stains.
Before you head over to a laundry and dry cleaning service, use this short stain-busting guide to remedy your post-holiday mess-ups.
When You Can’t Get Enough of Gravy
A holiday feast is incomplete if you’re not absolutely smothering something with gravy, be it turkey, chicken, beef, or pork. There’s just something about these rich and buttery sauces that make them such great pairings for meat. They’re horrible on your clothes, though.
When gravy drips onto your favorite ugly Christmas sweater or its grease splatters onto your countertop and apron while cooking, it creates a grease stain. After all, gravy is mostly made of fat and oil. What can you do to remedy them?
Dish soap is a great solution for these types of stains. They’re formulated to latch onto grease and get washed off with water. If blobs of gravy land on your shirt as you’re devouring a turkey leg, stop what you’re doing (or finish the whole thing, no one’s judging you), wash your hands, get a clean cloth, dampen it, and add a dab of dish soap on it.
Wipe the soapy cloth on the affected area to cut the grease, making it easier for your washing machine and laundry soap to get rid of the stain after your feast. This trick works on any oil-based stain.
Dessert Disasters
Dealing with stains related to desserts can be tricky because a variety of ingredients could be causing it. Common culprits include dairy and chocolate.
Here are different ways to deal with them.
- Dairy – This contains enzymes that cling onto cloth, especially when it becomes hard and gooey due to high temperatures. This makes it difficult to clean. Flush the milk or whipped cream stain in cold water. Use an enzyme-based spot cleaner like Biokleen Bac-Out or Puracy on the stain after.
- Chocolate – Chocolate also hardens after spending some time on cloth. Take a spoon and scrape off the hardened bits. Then, rub dish soap on it. Wash and rinse the cloth. If the spot is still there, a universal stain remover should do the trick.
One Too Many Drinks
Everyone’s been there: you have one too many glasses of your favorite red wine, you go in for another drink, and slosh some on your shirt or jeans. This drink is notorious for being a pain to clean. Fortunately, you don’t need to resort to mixing bleach and baking soda to clean it off.
Remedy fresh stains with a mound of salt and get the article of clothing into the wash as soon as possible. You could also use a stain remover that’s formulated for wine stains, which are great for spots that have been there for a while.
The holidays are for celebration, but they’re also days when you’ll stain your clothes a lot. If you find yourself dealing with grease, wine, chocolate and dairy stains, don’t panic. They may be hard to wash off the traditional way, but there are convenient methods to get rid of them. Now that the holidays are over, use these suggestions as guides to make your clothes look pristine.
