I was somewhat horrified when I pulled out the clothes for baby #3 and discovered that anything my second child wore was covered in yellow stains. The clothes were certainly stain free when I packed them. Come to find out, those stains are from proteins (like milk and spit up) that were left behind. My second baby spit up non stop whereas my first child spit up maybe once in her first year of life.
I hit up Pinterest and Facebook for tried and true methods of stain removal. Lots of suggestions were given, so I thought I would test them all and report back with my findings.
A few notes:
1) Everything was stained, but there were definitely items that were more stained than others.
2) I tried one non-white article of clothing on the method that seemed the most popular just because I was curious.
3) After soaking or scrubbing, I rinsed the article of clothing by hand. All items were then machine washed with mainstream detergent (which contains enzymes).
4) Wet items were set out in the sun to dry after being washed in detergent.
5) I did my best to capture the stains as best as I could in the photos. It really bothers me that the white balance does not match in the before and afters, but the before photos were taken on a cloudy day and the after photos on a very sunny day. When I adjusted the white balance, it made it more difficult to see the stains, so it is what it is. (Oh, and the photos were taken with an iPhone bc I was lazy.)
In order of least effective to most effective, here are the results:
Fels Naptha:
Fels Naptha did very little to lift this stain. I have used Fels Naptha with lots of success on wool items used for diapering. However, for this type of stain, it did not help very much.
Buncha Farmers Stain Stick:
Again, this did not do much for this stain. This stick works great on fresh stains, but did not do much here.
Powdered cascade:
This method definitely helped to lighten the stain, but it was still quite visible.
This one surprised me. I had some borax on hand because I will sometimes use it as a detergent booster, but never thought it did much. It definitely helped lighten the stain, but a little bit of the stain did remain.
First, let me state my love for biz. This stuff is like oxiclean on steroids. It has enzymes, so I have found it works really well on stains. Even better than oxiclean. I will say that this was the darkest stain of all. Biz did a great job lifting most of the stain, but there was still the slightest hint of a stain remaining. Bummer!
Oxiclean: THE WINNER!
Oxiclean was the only method that completely removed the stains and did not leave a trace of it.
After this experiment, I washed all the baby clothes in a mix of biz, borax, and oxiclean. I soaked for about 3 hours and then washed and dried. Nothing went into the sun this time and everything came out looking great! It might sound silly to have used all 3 methods together when the oxiclean by itself did the job. However, I did not have enough oxiclean on hand to use enough for all the clothes I needed to wash.
