Laundry Tip

One thing about pregnancy that is rather inconvenient to me is the "butterfingers effect" combined with (a) my inability to lean over the table while eating in the latter stages of pregnancy and (b) the tendency of my belly to catch falling food.  Um, that combined with having a toddler who considers me his personal napkin, gets my clothes pretty dirty by the end of the day. 

I recently had two of my favorite shirts, a brown one and a black one, out of commission because of the unfortunate placement of some grease spots on them.  If ya know what I mean.  I washed them over and over, using Spray and Wash, pre-treating with detergent, washing on hot, cold, anything I could think of, but they wouldn't come out because (I presume) they had been through the dryer.

Not wanting to reduce my already small-ish (usable) maternity wardrobe, I called my mom and asked her if she knew of anything that would remove set- in grease stains.  Of course she did.  Her first suggestions was Energine Spot Remover.  I did not have that on hand, have no idea if they still make it, and recall that it has a horrible, strong smell to it.  Then she suggested Fels Naptha soap.  Ding!  I realized at that moment that I had a fresh, unopened bar of that somewhere in my cleaning stash, but had forgotten all about it until that moment.

 

Photo courtesy of http://www.hardtofinditems.com/fels-naptha-soap-632902.html

I followed my mom's suggestion, and used an old toothbrush to work up a lather on the bar, then rub the suds into the stains on my shirts.  I didn't even let them soak long- just threw them in the wash.  They came out grease- spot- less!  Hurray!  I have since used the soap to get out more set- in grease stains, chocolate stains, amoxicillin stains (from my poor, ear infection prone toddler), and even blood.  I don't love doing laundry, but this makes me want to do a happy dance.  Or at least a happy wiggle, as dancing around is getting increasingly awkward.

I also found out that this soap is great for treating poison ivy, poison oak, and other itchy stuff- you wash your clothes in it, and can actually use it in the shower to remove the oily poison residues that are so hard to get off.  This might not be very relevant to some people, but I grew up on a Christmas tree farm (my family still lives there) and we had poison oak everywhere.  So that bit of information was especially interesting to me.
Apparently there are all sorts of other uses for it, but I won't bore you with the details here.  If you want to know more, I found an interesting page from my Google search here.  (And no, I'm not getting paid to write any of this, I just found it really useful!)