Stains be gone - the cool way

With four boys and an active husband I'm getting pretty good at hiding of getting rid of stains! You can see from previous posts that I've found things that work to get rid of stains for the most part. 

But occasionally I get a stain that is too stubborn and won't budge. Like this shirt for example, I love this shirt on my husband but the stain would not budge! It was very obvious and not wearable which made me sad cause I liked this shirt a lot.

So I used fabric paint and painted over it! I added a few other spots so that it looked more natural to the shirt (and to hide a smudge of paint I dropped, yes I'm terrible at doing that ;0).

 I used acrylic paint with a textile medium added since I have a hard time finding fabric paint in color other than basic red, yellow, green and blue. I highly recommend adding some to acrylic paint since it looks much more professional and doesn't crack. Make to sure to follow the textile mediums ratio to paint it may seem like a lot but it does affect how the paint will set.

From not wearable to looking almost new!

All you need are a few things to do this and you can use it for other projects too!

Fabric paint 

or acrylic with a textile medium

freezer paper for your design or you can free hand it 

Paint brush

That's it! Now you will have all you need for future projects and to cover any stains you might have :0)

~This post contains affiliate links which help support this blog however all opinions are my own.~

A little bit of real life home pictures

I have a project I have been working on all week and was going to show it to you today but just as I was coming to the end I ran out of interfacing, grrr. So naturally I went to the store to buy some and guess what? they were out of all interfacing as well! I mean what the heck!? I guess it wasn't meant to be posted today! ;0)

So instead I am going to share 2 projects we are working on in our home right now.

First is our master bathroom. The shower decided to go kaput and flood our floor so we needed to rip everything out and redo it. I'm really not complaining it wasn't in the best condition as you will soon see.

The bathroom is pretty small and longish shape  but I'm hoping our chages will make it look a little better when we are through.

Now I promise, promise the shower is super clean! Its just old, cheap and old. It had a major cracks in the bottom but we couldn't buy a new shower just yet so we tried to patch it up but didn't get the right paint, so it looks really bad. The patch job didn't last (go figure) and now we get to redo the whole thing because it flooded pretty good!

I'll be sharing updates on it when we finish...if we finish, lol!

Next is the boys room. Its been bad guys, so bad! All four boys share a room and even though there is plenty of space it is constantly a mess and they cannot keep their beds made, not even keep their sheets on!

I have a few ideas to change things up a bit and hopefully give the boys a place for all their things. I also will make some changes to their bedding.

They have sucjh a nice closet but I really haven't used it to its best capacity.I'm not entirely sure how to best use this space yet, I have a couple of ideas but it all needs to be able to fit in our super tight budget, so we'll see what actually happens..

Oh and do like our cheapo curtains? Those are courtesy of my husband who got tired of the boys complaints of it being to bright in their room so he grabbed some blankets and nailed them to the window. Yes its a red neck fix and no I wasn't happy and yet I still haven't changed it. real life folks that is all I can say.

Next time you see these rooms in their full glory I hope they will look better and more blog like ;-)

oh and I've been pinning some things here and there but if you have any ideas please, please share!

DIY Shout Spray

I don't know how your boys are but mine are dirty! Especially P, he is almost 4 and when he goes to preschool he comes home with who knows what on his sleeves!

 I have tried several things and usually the only thing that will get his sleeves clean looking is a soak with Oxiclean. Its not my favorite though it tends to wear out the colors on a shirt after a while and its a pain for me with my laundry set up right now.

 So I searched around and found this recipe for DIY shout on One Good Thing I gave it a try and WOW!

I sprayed, rubbed the fabric, washed and BOOM! look at how clean those sleeves are!

There are a few spots where the fabric is slightly darker because of the stains but it is really hard to see them. 

Here is the recipe super basic and easy:

• 2/3 cups Dawn Dishwashing Liquid
• 2/3 cups ammonia
• 6 Tbsp baking soda
• 2 cups warm water

Mix everything together and pour into a spray bottle.

Before you go to use it give it a good shake.

 

Here is Jillees great tutorial on the spray. 

Grease Stains

This is a tutorial I posted on my family blog and transferred over here!




I am forever finding grease stains in B's clothes, its like he plays with it or something. Usually it is my favorite shirt and its so bad I have had to throw a lot of them away. Frustrating when I can't afford to buy new clothes or just plain don't want to!
I went on a quest to get the grease out of our clothes! I went to the store and there were a lot of products that said they would work but I didn't like the price especially when I didn't know if it would even work (I did try a few and they only worked occasionally)! I searched the internet and the suggestions all failed me one by one. So I cleaned my washer thinking it would solve the cause, nope still had grease stains! I changed detergent: didn't work. I then concocted my own recipe for grease stain removal, and the results were amazing!!!
Here is my recipe and method, it has worked on everything I have tried it on so far!

Ingredients: Dawn dish Soap (not the kind with BLEACH) and baking soda

I have used other dish-soap and it didn't work so be sure to use dawn

Do you see how bad the stains are?
This shirt was just pulled out of the dryer so it works even if you have washed and dried the stains.

Drizzle the grease stains with Dawn dish soap

Then cover with baking soda.
You need to let it soak for awhile; I usually let it soak over night.
It doesn't work if it doesn't soak!

Next you need to rinse out the mixture, with warm water, while rubbing the shirt together (I tried to take a pic of me rubbing but you can't really tell).

Hang till mostly dry and wash like normal!

*Update 8-2013 I no longer hang dry I just throw in the washer after rinsing and it seems to work just as well.

Ta Da! Looks brand new, well maybe not brand new, but there are no stains!