Pinterest for the win

Last week, my BFF K was nice enough to hand down a gazillion outfits to P that her son has outgrown. They are all super cute, but she did warn me that a lot of them had some stains and she hadn't really tried too hard to get any of them out. Meaning, they had been set in for over a year. A lot of the clothes are just play clothes and outfits I plan to use for daycare, but there were some really adorable things and I decided to attempt a hardcore stain removal.

After searching good ol' trusty Pinterest, it led me to a few sites who swore by a magic laundry cleaner with a few simple household items:

Hydrogen Peroxide, Dawn Dishsoap and Baking Soda. 3 things everyone pretty much always has on hand. You do 2 parts peroxide and 1 part Dawn and baking soda. I mixed up a lot so I did 1 cup of peroxide and 1/2 cup of the Dawn and soda.

Mix it up really well - it obviously starts to bubble up from the peroxide. With the baking soda, it sort of becomes thick and paste-like. Isn't the color so pretty?

After I had my solution made up, I headed down to our dungeon laundry room and got to work  treating the stains.

This is the first outfit I worked on - isn't it adorable? I'm a sucker for anything with whales! You can't really tell from the picture, but there was a huge spit up stain going down the entire right side of this outfit. And it had been there for 2 years and washed and dried a million times to really set the stain in.

So I dumped a bunch of the mixture onto the stain. And yes, that's our baby monitor - had to use baby boy's nap time for something productive!

 Then I used a brush to scrub the stain remover into the stain. As per the instructions, I let it sit for 1 hour to let it really soak in.

 Again, these pictures really suck, but here's another stain on this adorable Polo outfit. Just take my word for it, the stain was there and really gross.

I mean, seriously, how adorable? You can see why I really wanted to get these stains out so baby boy could wear these!

 Madras collar! The other side of the white color was super stained.

 Again, hard to tell, but take my word for it! Gross baby food stain!

 Nautical romper! OMG!

 Spit up stain right on the front of the collar. Not cute.

So I applied the stain removed to like 8 outfits, scrubbed it in and let them all sit for an hour. Then I just washed them like normal.

 I put the remaining solution into a water bottle for future use!

 The results! I'm sorry that I can't truly capture how clean and bright white this turned out!
The stain is 100% GONE!

 I can't wait to put P in this!

And the collar of this one is now super white! Every single outfit came clean with zero stains left behind. I just wish I could capture it better on film, but I was blown away by how well it worked.

So I would highly recommend this for any stains, especially set in ones that are tough to get out. It's inexpensive as well, which is always a plus in my book. Gotta love Pinterest!