Sunlight Laundry Diva Contest
Written by Jill // August 26, 2010 // Featured // 39 Comments
![SunlightBasket[1][1]](http://www.urbanmommies.com/wp-content/uploads/SunlightBasket11-300x292.jpg "SunlightBasket[1][1]")
Admit it. You’re a laundry diva. Folding, stain removal and line-drying make your heart race.. Well, even if we’re wrong, we bet you have a few laundry secrets and tips to share with us. Comment with your laundry secrets, and we’ll send this Sunlight Deep Clean basket to one of you. You’ll want to send them to school super-clean (even if they don’t come home that way). We can’t wait to read your tips. Good luck! xx
Jill Amery is a mom of 2 monkeys/stormtroopers and Editor and Publisher at UrbanMommies Media. Though she's based in Canada, her palette is mostly French and her fashion sense is decidedly Italian. When taking a break from her busy travel schedule, she can be found hosting complicated dinner parties or surfing ebay for obscure vintage gowns.
39 Comments on "Sunlight Laundry Diva Contest"
For oily food stains I sometimes will use dish soap if stainremover didn’t do the trick and to remove oil stains from working on a car I have used carpet cleaner…a little extreme, I only recommend it for jeans as it can cause some fading. I figure a little fading on jeans looks better than big black oil stains :)
I love the fresh smell of clean laundry straight out of the dryer! And nothing beats a warm, fluffy towel when you get out of the shower on a crisp day!!
Now.. if I could only love hanging the laundry as much .. :)
I put a squirt of lemon juice in my water when filling machine to mix with my detergent and my sheets smell divine.
Wow – do I ever need this with a newborn and a busy 2 year old! :) My trick is to attach a stain as quickly as I can when it happens – even if that only means rinsing it with cold water or soda water until I can get to the laundry. For tougher stains – I also pretreat by rubbing in some Sunlight directly onto the stain until I can wash.
I use Grandma’s secret spot remover on the tough stuff (it’s a brand). And for diapers, sometimes I put some white vinegar in the rinse cycle to help out!
One thing that I find helpful is to not dry (in the drier) anything still holding stains after washing; sometimes a second wash will remove the marks.
For grease/oil stains I rub a bar of white soap (non scented, no color)over the stain, wash and comes right out!
I love Sunlight detergent, I just bought my first bottle the other day and it DOES smell like sunshine!!
If stains are really bad, I soak in lemon and lay the laundry in the sun.
To remove grease from clothes: Empty a can of Coke
into the load of greasy clothes, add detergent, and run
through a regular cycle. The Coca-Cola will help loosen
grease stains. Not drinking Coke, are you?
There’s nothing quite like making whites bright by soaking in lemon water and laying them in the sun.
I just had baby#4 and needed to get some old stains out of my oldest child’s clothes(mostly from nursing and spitting up…the ugly yellow stains that only show up over time)
I treated all of the stains with meat tenderizer(found in the spice aisle in the grocery store)and water, to make a paste. I rubbed it onto the stains with a toothbrush and let the clothes sit overnight. I then laundered them like usual and most of the stains came out in the first wash. Some of the tougher stains needed a second treatment, but came out the second time around.
For grease stains, I rub a little shampoo on the spots and launder as usual. Stains out every time! Good thing, with a 4 year old and 1 1/2 year old twins.
a couple drops of lemon in the wash water. Mmmm.
Vinegar! Takes the puke smell out of clothes. A glug glug in the washing machine along with detergent is a saving grace when you’ve got a kid with a weak stomach like I do! And have to agree with the liquid dish detergent on grease spots! Amazing.
To remove under arm pit stains I make a paste of baking soda and water, and let it sit for 20 minutes. Rinse, then wash as usual.
Hey there — I’m the one who wrote about Simple Green, but the site glitched, and then you fixed it and said I could have a double-entry for my inconvenience if I still wanted…I do!!
The most powerful weapon in my laundry arsenal is Simple Green. Sometimes this product is sold in your average ‘Paper Goods & Chemicals’ department, sometimes in the ‘Automotive’ department. (Why? It’s strong enough, when concentrated, to clean off car grease/oil…without eating through fabric even then, I might add.) It’s eco-friendly, kid-friendly, pet-friendly, sold in spray bottles and bulk refill containers, and comes as a liquid concentrate with variable dilution instructions for different kinds of jobs. It’s become my go-to product for just about every household cleaning challenge except soap scum. Very cost effective. Not the greatest scent in the world, but not headache-inducing either, and you can always make things smell nicer AFTER they’ve been cleaned beyond what the nicer-smelling products could handle. It has cleaned permanent ink off of clothes. It has cleaned I-waited-too-long-to-clean-the-kitchen burned-in grease off the stovetop. It has cleaned “potty accident” residue off of apholstered furniture. It has cleaned my husband off after he worked on the car. It’s not just a laundry trick, it’s a most-of-the-house-trick!
And since I’m double-entering, might as well give you another trick, since I see a lot of people talking about removing potent smells…
MOUTHWASH! That’s right, we use mouthwash to obliterate the smells of throw-up, spit-up, exploded-in-the-other-direction, etc. We use it on anything hard-surfaced that might have gotten stinky, and we use it on the fabrics too. Thankfully, they make clear versions, so you don’t have to worry about the mouthwash dye adding itself to clothes or linens or whatnot. Advantages of mouthwash are that it helps remove odors, it helps overpower odors at the same time with a scent that isn’t itself unpleasant (just very strong), it gets a head-start on killing many kinds of bacteria, it’s non-harsh-chemically, it washes away, itself, easily — and unlike white vinegar, it isn’t a color-setter, so you’re not going to set the puke STAINS while trying to remove puke STINK.
Three times the charm? Tangentally, white vinegar is a color-setter. Any new clothes in dark colors….anything in the common bleed culprits of red or purple….and any common fabric culprits like bathing suits….get soaked in diluted white vinegar before their first wash, to help make sure the dye is set. If it’s an article of clothing that can handle hot water, dilute the white vinegar with hot water to get the best results overall. You can actually add salt to make it a little better yet, but only if the salt is well-dissolved and the clothing is really free-floating and submerged, so there isn’t any undissolved salt that’s going to collect in any given spot, as that would lead to a dappled effect in how the dye sets.
My laundry tip secret is “Sunlight’s BAR Soap!” It can be found locally in stores too, but I’m always surprised that most folks don’t know about it. Such an awesome stain remover! When I travel I bring it along for handwashing clothes. I have brought along extra Sunlight Bars to give to relatives in Europe and recently gave a bar to my neighbour and that is the honest truth. It says on the label it is pure soap tested for over 100 years. Thanks in advance for this wonderful oppurtunity to win some more of their fantastic products.
Twitter’s @toothfairycyber
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Sweet + Soapy Tweeted it!
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I used toothpaste(has to be paste, not gel)to remove permanent marker from clothes, hands and table after my daughter colored on herself. It comes out instantly…makes you wonder what is inside toothpaste :)
Did you know that brown paper and your hot iron when rubbed over candle wax will remove it from clothes? Then soak it in degergent & it comes clean with no stain & no fuss.
We use cloth diapers and Sunlight is the BEST detergent to clean our diapers completely. First I do a cold wash in Sunlight with 1 rinse cycle. Then I follow that with a HOT wash in Sunlight (unscented). No need to pre-wash and all the stains come-out completely. The best part is that we hang the diapers to dry (outside in the sun or inside when it’s raining).
When washing comforters, pillows and down jackets use a knotted towel or tennis balls in the dryer to fluff up the down.
When we are out socializing at a friend’s house, and my sweet little girl poops out her diaper onto her clothes, I always use a squirt of Sunlight dish soap. When it dries, it’s like the stain never happened. It’s the perfect plan “b” when you aren’t home to use laundry detergent!
I use hydrogen peroxide to brighten whites. Not the drug store strength but the 33% strength you can get from health and supplement stores (eg., Finlandia). Dilute it with water and include in wash as a bleach alternative. Its environmentally friendly and works!!
hairspray is a great stain remover. Spray it on immediately and then you can wait to wash it.
Eye makeup remover is the perfect stain remover! the silicone in the product lifts up those tough stains. Even things like pen ink and grease stains, and we all know how difficult it can be to get those out.
I have a delicates zipper bag pinned to the side of the laundry hampers in each of the kids’ rooms so that when small items like socks, leggings, and scratch mittens need laundering they’re already sorted and definitely won’t end up in the Bermuda Triangle!
For those tough set in stains nothing works better than liquid detergent and a penny. Pour a little detergent on the stain and rub it in with the side of the penny. This really helps get the detergent down into the heart of the stain.
If you like to line dry, but don’t like crispy towels and underwear, try taking the stuff off the line in the evening, just as it’s getting dewy. The items will have a slight damp to them, but if you bring them in and fold them, they are softer and dry by the time you are done. So far this is the only trick that’s worked for me without resorting to a quick tumble in the dryer with dryer balls
My grandson got black marker on my faux suede couch and I was sure it wouldn’t come out. A friend told me to try rubbing alcohol and throw the cushion cover in the wash and wow! It came out….amazing.
Dr Bronner’s Magic Soap works wonders undiluted as a stain remover.
Using a Qtip to apply a small amount of bleach has removed pen marks from white background clothing without effecting the patterned colours. As well a red track suit that bled colour onto the white piping was saved by careful application of bleach using what was a bathroom staple. I now have a box of Qtips in my laundry room for stain removal that requires a careful application.
I use a lavender sache in the dryer for a nice light scent.
Dryer balls.
I use hairspray to get oil/ grease stains (even washed and dried) out of my clothes. The cheaper the better it works.
I use baking soda with little bit of water to soak for an hour or for tougher stains over night. It work well and it is environmentally friendly too!
When I have a super tough stain, like wine. I use a small amount of detergent and watered down hydrogen peroxide, rinse well and then throw in the wash. You can also substitute the detergent for rug cleaner and it will remove wine immediately from any carpet!
So funny! We thought you said you just drink wine and forget about it! Ha ha.