Thursday, March 22, 2012

The Fight against Stains, a DIY Project

After writing about cloth napkins, one drawback occurred to me.

Stains.

I hate them.  I have many cloth napkins that were once a gorgeous white that now look permanently dirty due to stains.  Spaghetti stains, coffee stains, grease stains... you name it, they're lurking on my cloth napkins.  I know that they're clean, but they don't look like it.



I've tried fighting them, but in the end, the stains always win.  As I did my laundry today I thought about this and tried to figure out what to do. 

They're really not a big deal... at least, not until company arrives.  That's the point in which I panic.  I search through my napkins looking for a few that don't have stains.  This, as you can imagine, can be very tiring.

But then I realized something.  What if instead of fighting the stains, I incorporate them into the overall design?  The tags warn me against using dye, but what if I use... food? 

Yeah, it seems nuts.

So naturally, I'm trying it.  I picked a truly nasty cloth napkin - one that has pizza sauce stains all over the edges.



At the moment, I'm boiling some soon-to-expire pizza sauce mixed into some water, and soaking my nasty looking cloth inside.



Pretty gross, huh?

I had used half of the sauce a while back, but the remaining half ended up hiding in the very back of my fridge.  Rather than throwing it out, I figure I can use it in this crazy experiment.

If all goes well, I'll have a yellow to orange napkin.  If not, I'll have a nicely learned lesson.  It seems like a great idea to me!!!

Results to follow in another post.  Stay tuned, and wish me luck!

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