Laundry Stripping

I have been obsessed with TikTok lately, and I’ve been seeing this video where people “strip their laundry”. Basically what it is is that they take whatever fabric item they want (i.e: bedsheets, shirts, pillowcases, towels, etc.), and soak it in a water-laundry-detergent-borax mixture.

I wanted to try this out on my bedding. I really didn’t think that it was that dirty because I do regularly wash them. I gathered all my supplies and ran the bath as hot as I could.

This is what I used in this method:

• Laundry detergent – 1 cup
• Borax or oxyclean (I did both) – 1 cup
• Laundry softener – 1/4 cup (Don’t use too much because if you can’t put your blanket in the wash after it’s hard to hand wash out)

While the bath was running, I put in all the ingredients and I used a broom handle to stir it all around because the water was really hot.

Once the tub was about 1/2 full, I put in my pillow cases, sheets, duvet and a smaller throw blanket. I stirred them all up and ran the water until they were all submerged.

If you’re wanting to do this, be warned, it is an all day process. I started around noon and left the articles for 6 hours (the longer the better). So I let this soak all day and I stirred/rotated everything about every 30-60 mins.

I took out the things that were small enough to fit in my washer to run a rinse cycle. My duvet was too big to fit in the washer properly so I rinsed it out in the tub (which TBH is kind of hard because it’s really heavy). I did this in the summer time so I was able to put my duvet outside to dry afterwards (you can for sure hang it up inside to dry, just make sure you have something underneath to catch the dripping).

I brought my duvet back inside when it started to get dark and let it hang for the night and the next whole day and by then it was dry enough to put it back on the bed!

I found it super satisfying to see all he gunk come off (even though it was pretty gross). I highly recommend doing this! I felt like my whole bedding was soooo clean and it smelled so good.

I will say at times it can be hard, especially if you’re doing something huge like a blanket, it can get pretty heavy. For the most part, it was really easy to do!

I wish that I had a before image to share. Since we have well water, we get rust stains on everything. I just have to say that this method is excellent in taking out the deep dirt thats ingrained in the fabric.

I think next time I’m going to try and do all of my white shirts and see how that works out!

Thank you for reading!

xox

Carli 🙂