Can you tell me how to remove tomato ketchup stains from clothes? I’m a new stepmom with little kids who love hot dogs and pizza. But I can’t send them back to their mother with spots on their shirts.
Catia Jones, Springfield, IL
Spots from food like this can be persistent. Let me tell you how to remove tomato ketchup stains from clothes. It’s not hard if you use the right tools.
To start cleaning tomato sauce spots, from a spill or when you are canning tomato sauce, scrape away any remnant of it first. Then put the back side of the cloth under cool running water. This rinses out some of the ketchup without spreading it further.
Now grab liquid dish soap or laundry detergent. Rub it into the spot with a circular motion moving in toward the center. After that, let the soap work for ten minutes.
Next, soak a sponge in distilled white vinegar and blot the stain. Rinse it with water and blot it with vinegar again. By this point, most of the tomato spot should be gone.
Finally, pre-treat the area with stain remover, then wash the clothing as usual. Should the spot still remain visible, try treating with detergent again and letting it soak in warm water for half an hour. If worse comes to worst, there’s always color-safe bleach.
If you’re removing oil stains, a lipstick mark or even paint stains from white fabric, you can follow the same steps above but replace the vinegar with hydrogen peroxide. Check out this page for details: https://www.tipsbulletin.com/how-to-remove-tomato-stains/
Also, did you know that baking soda is the perfect way to get tomato stains from plastic containers? Those stubborn marks left over from storing spaghetti and the like come off easier when you use soda to scrub them. In conclusion, I hope these methods help you clean the children’s clothes in a flash.