Something That Actually Works!!!

Quote for the day: 

"Never put off till tomorrow what you can put off till

 the day after tomorrow."

~Mark Twain

I've really been enjoying surfing Pinterest and gleaning ideas from the "pins".  I must say that I don't spend as much time on Pinterest as I originally was afraid that I would.  Once you get your account started and your boards set up, it's really easy to just skim quickly the new "pins" since your last visit.  Also, I mainly only skim the DYI & Crafts "pins", the Home Decor "pins", and the "pins" from my friends.


I have trouble with developing yellow stains in the underarms of my white shirts, sometimes after just one season of wear.  :(  This makes me very unhappy.  I have tried very hard to get the stains out, but had resorted to just saving those shirts for "Saturday" wear...you know...the things you wear around the house when you aren't going anywhere!

Well, I found a "recipe" on Pinterest that purported to get out underarm stains so I had to give it a try on 3 of my favorite white knit shirts.  I will tell you right now that I did not take before and after photos because I just didn't think my camera was good enough to get good photos of something like yellow underarm stains.  So you are just going to have to take my word for it...IT WORKS!!!

Here's the recipe...
1 part Dawn dishwashing liquid and 2 parts hydrogen peroxide.  Mix it up and apply it to the underarm stains using a soft laundry brush.  Let the concoction sit on the stain for at least an hour...I left mine on for more like 2.5 hours just because I got busy quilting and lost track of the time.  Then wash your items as usual.

Now...there is one caveat...
This solution needs to be applied LIBERALLY for it to work.  I tried it on 3 shirts but really only had enough to thoroughly saturate 2 of them.  I applied the remainder of the solution lightly to the third shirt and those stains did NOT come out, though, they may have been slightly lighter after the wash.

The info says you can use it on regular stains on colors, too, but I haven't tried that one, yet.  If you try it on colors, I would make sure that it is something that is "unwearable" as it is with the stain so that if something happens to the color and it ruins the shirt, you are only out something that wasn't wearable/useable anyway.

So go get those shirts with the underarm stains and try this!  Go.  Now.  I'll be here when you get back. :)

One of the shirts I used it on was one of my favorite shirts of all time that had been relegated to "Saturday" wear only because the stains were so bad.  You don't know how happy I am to now be able to wear the shirt out in public again!  :)  I LOVE this shirt.  (BTW, I'm wearing it right now!  LOL)


On the quilting front, I've been using my scrap and "strings" (strips of fabric less than 1.5" wide) to make some Virginia Bound blocks from Bonnie Hunter's first Scraps & Shirttails book.

This is a paper-pieced block.  The first several blocks I made, I used regular printing paper.  However, I found that printing paper can be a little stubborn to remove from the back of the blocks, so I started to think of what kind of paper do I have that is thinner and would tear off the backs better.

LIGHTBULB MOMENT ALERT!!

Using an exact-o knife...or scalpel, as we call them at work...I cut pages from the old phone book, cutting them as close to the spine as I could.

Then I just fed them through my printer...

...scanned the template and printed it directly onto the phone book pages.

This is what the block looks like before I've trimmed it down to the correct size and trimmed off all the excess...

This thinner paper from the phone book is SOOOOOOOOOO  much easier to remove!  :)  Am I a genius, or what???

 
Happy Good Friday! 
Loretta