Saving Crayon Stained Clothes

Last week I washed and dried a load of my daughter's laundry that contained a purple crayon.  I didn't realize that every single piece of clothing had purple crayon stains on it as I transferred it from the washer to the dryer.  So all the waxy crayon stains were melted in for good - or so I thought.  I quickly searched Pinterest and realized I wasn't the only one this had happened to.  Several other people had done the same thing.  The best part was, they had also found a way to save their laundry.  

I used our regular laundry detergent, some vinegar, and some dish soap.  I didn't bother measuring it out, but most recipes called for 1/2 cup vinegar and 5 tablespoons of dish soap.  

I set the washer on the hottest setting and let the clothes soak for 2 hours.

You also want to clean out your dryer.  If there are any crayon stains in there, just use a magic eraser to get wipe them off.

Here's the culprit, or what remains of it.  All the crayon is gone and only the paper cover remains.

Here are some before pictures of the clothing.  A tee shirt and a bathing suit:

A pair of light pink shorts and a tee shirt:

After soaking the clothes for 2 hours and running the wash like normal, I repeated the process because a few marks remained.  

Here are the after pictures.

And here are the before and afters for comparison:

The tee shirt is completely stain free and the bathing suit stains are much less noticeable.

Only one stain remained on the tee shirt and two lighter stains were left on the shorts.

These tan capris were only left with two light stains.  

You can see that the stain remover solution didn't take out everything, but it took out a lot.  I was surprised at how well it worked without me having to scrub anything.  Out of a full load of laundry, only 7 items had stains that didn't come out.  That's much better than loosing a whole load of laundry. 

Anyone else have this problem?

What stain removers did you try? 

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Behind the Laundry Room Door

I've been wanting to add some extra hooks in the laundry room for our jackets and stuff.  The hold up was that I didn't want the hooks to stick out and hit the door when it was opened.  I also didn't want to drill holes into the wall and add hooks, I liked the look of the hooks being attached to a board of wood.  After searching online and at some stores, I finally found a solution.

The Tjusig Rack with 5 hooks from Ikea.  It sells for $9.99 and comes in black or white.  I wanted to get white since it matches the white door, trim, cabinets and our washer and dryer.  Not to mention the little laundry room gallery wall I have in there, the frames are all white too.

So now that I found the perfect hook solution, I just needed to buy it.  Well, unfortunately Ikea does not sell this on their website, and the closest Ikea is about 2 hours away.  It would be a while before I planned a trip there.  However, husband had a business meeting near Philly last week.  When he told me that, I mentioned that there is an Ikea near Philly and I've been wanting to get something at Ikea.  He mentioned that he probably wouldn't have time to stop there but still asked what it was that I wanted to buy.

Are you seeing where this is leading?  Are you thinking my sweet husband wanted to surprise me with these hooks?  Well, he really wanted to surprise me, but after being in Ikea and looking at a bunch of hook options in several different departments, he wasn't sure which one I wanted.  He called me on the phone to ask which one it was and then quickly found it.

So here they are.  The top one is the front view and the bottom one is the back view.

And here they are hung up in the laundry room right behind the door.

Laundry Room Gallery Wall Update

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my laundry room gallery wall and how I was looking for a smaller letter R (or something else) to fill in the gap there.  Well, I didn't find a letter R, but I did find something to go in that spot.

Laundry Room Gallery Wall

In my last post I talked about wanting a letter R as part of my laundry room gallery wall.  So today I'll show you the before and after of that wall.  Keep in mind I still haven't found my little letter R to fill the empty spot. I might even find something different, but I'll know it when I see it and until then it will just have to look like it's missing something.

When we moved into this house about 5 years ago, the laundry room was painted this bright celery or sage green color.  I liked it (and didn't feel like painting) so it stayed.

There is a security system panel on this wall that I wanted to conceal by adding more stuff around it.  I had seen various other gallery walls such as those listed here, here and here.  I knew I could do something similar in my laundry room.  Since the washer, dryer, cabinets, trim and doors were all white, I decided to paint the picture frames white to keep it all looking cohesive.  I had all the frames and just painted them so this whole project only cost about $4.00 for a can of flat white spray paint.