Backwards WFMW: A laundry question
This week, Shannon at Rocks in My Dryer is once again hosting
a Backwards Works for Me Wednesday listing. What she means
is this: “Instead of posting a piece of advice, ask for some.
Do you have a specific household/ parenting/etc. challenge
that has you stumped?”
So, here’s my deep, profound question for all the world:
How do you get out (or prevent) those stains down the front of your baby’s onesies? You know what I mean… those yellowish stains that come from drool or spit up. The ones that plague the front of all your little one’s cutest outfits. All of my children have been breastfed, so it’s not a formula issue. How do I get rid of those? Please help!
Now that you’ve hopefully left me some amazing advice, head on over to Rocks in My Dryer and leave some more for another questioning soul. Click here to help!
January 8th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Wet them down (even if they’ve been dried in) and stick them in the sun. You may need to have them out there for quite a while. It doesn’t matter how cold it is, as long as you have sun, it should work.
January 8th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Listen to Happy Geek!! The sun WILL work! I’m breastfeeding and cloth diapering a 6 month old and I hang things in the sun all the time. It will even take out baby food stains like carrots! It really is quite amazing!
January 8th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
What I did for my kids clothes was soak them in an oxiclean solution for a few days. It doesn’t work so well with red colors (it bled everywhere), but otherwise, it was great! It even worked for me after I ran stuff through the dryer.
January 9th, 2008 at 12:01 am
OxyClean usually worked for me, the spray or powder. My mom swears by Shout. If all else fails, demote those clothes to the ‘play clothes’ drawer!
January 9th, 2008 at 12:09 am
When I was pregnant with my firstborn, a mom of 4 gave me this advice about spit-up stains: “Use Spray-N-Wash. Not Shout. Not anything else. Spray-N-Wash.” I have used spray-n-wash on every opaque spit-up mark, and we have never had a spit-up stain.
January 9th, 2008 at 7:01 am
I used to soak the baby clothes in OxyClean overnight, then wash them. It always worked well for me.
January 9th, 2008 at 10:37 am
I will try the sunshine idea. I have 5 children and every time I get out the infant clothes box I have to try to get rid of these stains. What has worked for me is to bleach them. I know it won’t work for all clothes, but so far it’s worked for most of them. Another idea is to keep a Stain Stick or Spray-n-Wash in the kitchen where the stain usually happens and spray it as soon as it happens. Then if it sits in the laundry it won’t be too hard to get out.
January 9th, 2008 at 10:44 am
When my son was a baby I loved the brand “Totally Toddler” that Walmart used to sell. Not sure if they sell that anymore. I also have used a mixture of a bit of dish soap, about 1/4 c. ammonia, and mix in a spray bottle with water. This works well too
January 9th, 2008 at 10:51 am
I breastfed my babies also, and they both had severe reflux so I dealt with those stains often. The best thing that I found for them was to use oxiclean. I pretreated the stains with oxiclean, and then washed them on the highest water temp that I could with my regular detergent and a scoop of oxiclean added to the wash! It worked most of the time, enough so that I was able to pass my daughter’s white and neutral onesies on to her brother 2 years late! Good luck!
January 9th, 2008 at 10:58 am
When my kids were little ( which was a long time ago) I used Wisk. It worked great.
January 9th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
I use Zout spray to pretreat all stains. It works great on spitup, baby poop, and baby food stains. Then I add oxyclean to every load of laundry that I do. That seems to work on all of them.
My granny actually told my mom that I do a wonderful job with the kids’ laundry - she said they never have a speck on them
January 9th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
MIL swears by BIZ as a soaking agent for FIL’s socks, undies, & the white t-shirts he wears as a contractor every day. We send stuff that comes back from our laundry w/a stain & she gets it out by putting it in her BIZ soak.
January 10th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
I just bought a bottle of Shout Advanced (and I’m more than halfway through it!!) and I’ve never seen anything take out set-in stains like this stuff. I have pulled clothes out of my kids’ closet that has had stains for A WHILE. I mean, A WHILE. These are clothes that have been washed and dried dozens of times since the original stain. They may need to sit longer (a day or two) the older the stain is and sometimes I didn’t wait long enough before I washed it and had to add more and wait longer, but it has removed E-VER-Y-THING I have thrown at it.
I typically try to buy safer, or cheaper, or organic, green type things. But seeing as how this bottle has saved my kids wardrobe in a major way (because my 4 year old daughter has an incredible knack for staining new clothes almost immediately) I feel that this bottle has total been worth the cost.