I’m what’s known in polite circles as fat. Because of this, my frontage is not so much vertical as horizontal; kind of a series of plateaux; I’m built like ziggurat.
So any food that falls off a fork (only rarely does this happen–only rarely!), or drips off a spoon, does not fall past me and back onto the plate; rather it flows, magmalike, down my slopes.
Now, I try to catch and pretreat these little, um, divots, but once in a while one will slip past me and go through the wash. I’ve found that when this happens, the grease spot is not effectively removed in the wash cycle, and is in fact somehow set by the dryer. Once this happens, nothing I have ever tried has any effect at all in removing the spot.
Believe it or not, the waterless hand cleaner(Gojo/Goop brand) that you can buy at auto parts stores for .99 USD works amazingly well on grease spots.
Learned that when I was using it to clean my hands after working on my car and got a big glob on the greasy thighs of my jeans. After washing, the jeans were pretty badly stained except where that one glob had done a pretty good job of removing the grease.
Since then I’ve tried it on all sorts of grease spots, and it seems to work fine.
I’d do all the normal colorfastness tests though- I don’t know exactly what all fabrics and dyes it’s safe for.
A strong base will handle dried oils but is harsh on fabrics too. That’s why traditional soaps worked so well. I found some cake laundry soap in mexico called Don Maximo. I don’t use it in the laundry but pre-rubbing stains with a little water works wonders.
If I have on a white shirt and a get hit with an obvious stain at dinner I excuse myself and in the bathroom I saturate the immediate area around the stain with a paper towel and water and by rubbing spread it around a bit. (dipping a napkin in your ice water at ther table and rubbing it would work about as well but is not as suave)
95% of the time this keeps the particle concentration of the dying agents in the staining food low enough that it comes out clean in the wash or the dry cleaner. There is no magic for stains that have set as they have physically changed the color of the fiber permanently. The key is to remove as much of the dying agents as possible and dilute the remaining ones.
Miss Manners disapproves, but I tuck a napkin under my chin, thereby protecting the Slopes of Lynn. When I’m eating barbecue at home, I’ve gone so far as to drape a towel across my front. I love barbecue, but it is messy. I have considered bringing my own towel with me when I go to eat barbecue in public, but my daughter assures me that she would simply die of embarrasment.
Many stains will set in the dryer. It’s not surprising when you consider that the material is literally baked into the cloth.
To help in pretreatment, you can examine the item of clothing when you remove it, and put a safety pin on each stain, then check for safety pins on laundry day. If you’ve got the room, the equipment, and the inclination, you can also line-dry your clothes, which will help prevent the stains from setting and help the clothes last longer. However, I personally don’t like to iron, so I tumble dry MY clothes. I do hang my undies up to dry in the bathroom, which has the added benefit of annoying my husband.
DON"T RUB THE STAIN! It will work the staining agent (how’s that for a techinical term that I completely made up) into the fibers of the clothing. Blot the stain to absorb as much of the grease as you can. Pre-soak. Wash, line dry.
For me, breakfast, lunch, or dinner is never over until I am wearing it.
Thanks for the “goop” tip. I use an industrial degreaser called “Spray Nine” that works pretty well if the stain is not set. Also, I have used charcoal lighter fluid to remove heavy grease, and then the Spray Nine to remove the lighter fluid stain.