My daughter came home yesterday with pink permanent magic
marker stains on the sleeve of one of her favorite shirts. This was not a cheap shirt. My wife was not happy and my daughter was in
tears because it was a Frozen themed shirt with Elsa and Anna on it, her
favorite characters right now. My first
inclination was to start looking for a replacement because it seemed unlikely
that this shirt would ever be OK to wear again.
Several family members and friends offered remedies that
seemed completely farfetched, but given my reluctance to spend money on an
article of clothing that we already purchased once, I decided it was worth at
least giving them a try.
The option that was least likely to work, in my opinion was
to soak the shirt in milk, but as it turns out, it was the solution that kept
me from having to go out shopping for Frozen shirts.
We took a cereal bowl, which has seen its fair share of milk
and filled it almost completely full with whole milk straight from the
refrigerator. There were pink stains
around the cuff and also higher on the sleeve, but we decided to start small
and just soak the first two or three inches of the sleeve and see what
happened. To our surprise, within
minutes, the milk had already started turning a faint shade of pink. We let the whole arrangement sit overnight.
The next morning, my wife checked on the shirt and noticed
that the bowl of milk was almost empty.
We don't own a cat. so it seems that the shirt was rather thirsty and
soaked the milk up slowly. Fortunately,
we positioned the shirt and bowl in the center of the counter so that it didn't
get too heavy and fall off the side pulling the bowl with it.
Amazingly, the permanent marker stains were about 95%
gone. There was a slight mark left, but
it so faint, it was almost unnoticeable.
The worst stains had completely disappeared. Of course, the next step was to immediately
wash the shirt so that my daughter didn't smell like sour milk the next day at
school. So today, I learned an important
lesson: If you have a bad stain and nothing else will clean it, try whole milk. You may be as pleasantly surprised as we
were.
