Hubby and I took the dogs for a walk through the woods today, and the hems of my jeans got pretty muddy. As I was putting them into the wash, I happened to spot the stain pre-treat bottle, and wondered if I should use it.
“Nah,” I thought. “Mud’s just dirt and will dissolve away without any additional treatment,” but then I thought of a pair of my jeans which has a permenant (but faint) brownish tinge around the bottom hem.
What say you? Do you usually pre-treat mud spots? Would just pouring the detergent directly onto the jeans do the trick?
Personally, I usually don’t bother pre-treating anything at all, but I’m dying to know if you wound up pre-treating your jeans.
When I have BIZ in the house, I run each load of laundry through a pre-wash cycle. It strikes me that if you were in the habit of doing that, an inspection of any questionable items should help you determine whether extraordinary measures need to be taken.
Me, I can’t see spending that much attention on the laundry.
I wouldn’t normally consider mud a stain–I think of stains as things that go into the fabric and stay there. But mud can certainly have things in it that can stain. And not that I’m any good with laundry, but I would brush off as much as possible and pretreat it anyway on the theory that it can’t hurt and might save my pants.
In college we used to swim in the Washita River, which was red. It stained everything. If your swimsuit was aqua, the Washita would turn it a dingy shade of gray. If your swimsuit was white–well, perish the thought. We used this as an excuse to mostly not wear swimsuits, but it was a pretty good excuse. The Washita would also stain our skin but it just made us look more tan.
It was the brown silty clay that we have in creeks around here.
Yes, I did end up pre-treating. I figured it couldn’t hurt. The jeans came clean, but I don’t know whther to attribute that to the Spray-N-Wash or not.
See, I’m not a girl who gets muddy very often, so I have little experience.
We have yellow, brown and red clays in my general area. All stain badly and I have to pretreat for significant amounts and sometimes, it still doesn’t work.
Georgia red clay will stain. When I worked on a construction site, my white athletic socks eventually became reddish - bleach wouldn’t even get them clean.
