Question
I laid my clothes over the back of a wooden chair and the wood stain came off onto my clothes. One of the articles of clothing is a white t-shirt and the other is a striped cotton button-down dress. How do I get the wood stain out of my clothes?
Answer
My first question is: was the chair freshly stained? Considering the stain that would make sense, but that would also be a problem since the dye in a wood stain is pretty concentrated and not likely to come out.
But if a little bit of the finish on an older chair rubbed off, then you could try pre-treating the stain on the white cotton shirt with a bleach and water solution made with ¼ cup Clorox® Disinfecting Bleach added to ¾ cup water. Apply the bleach and water solution to the stain and then immediately machine wash the item using detergent and ⅓ cup Clorox® Disinfecting Bleach. Air dry and check for success. Hopefully the stain will be gone but if it is lighter, repeat the treatment. You could also try this if the chair was freshly stained, but I’m not sure if it would be as effective since the stain would have been able to absorb into the cellulose (cotton is similar to wood, after all) rather than just sit on top of the fabric. It’s still worth a try, and you may also want to try applying a little alcohol-based hand sanitizer to break up the stain before applying the bleach solution. This works well for ink stains and could help here.
For the striped button-down dress, the concentrated bleach and water solution recommended for pretreating won’t be appropriate because of the color in the dress, so try pretreating with Clorox 2® For Colors Stain Remover and Laundry Additive. Apply a little liquid Clorox 2® directly to the stain and rub in. Wait 10 minutes then machine wash in the hottest water recommended using detergent and a little more Clorox 2®.
Without seeing the items or knowing whether or not they picked up fresh stain, it’s difficult to advise the best way to proceed, but hopefully this is enough information for you to get started. Also, seeing what works for the white cotton t-shirt will be useful information to guide you in how you proceed with the striped dress.
