Dinner may have looked great on your plate, but you may have different feelings now that it’s on your shirt!

Eat three square meals a day and getting a food stain, spot, or spill on you is something that is hard to avoid. Try as you may to make sure you’ve tucked a napkin securely into your collar, lean over your plate, or watch your elbows, your shirts and trousers often feel like magnets for messy food accidents – especially if they are lighter colors!

The longer you let nasty food and drink stains like sauces, wine, oil and grease, coffee, and others linger on your favorite clothes, the greater the risk you run that they turn from an inconvenient spot to a full-blown attire-ruiner. That is why taking immediate action to remove food stains is of the utmost importance.

Your best course of action to remove food stains is to take it to the dry cleaners. But, if your stain happens in the evening or in the middle of a busy weekend, getting it to the cleaners isn’t necessarily something you can do right away. Fortunately, there are actions you can take to mitigate the stain until you can get it to the cleaners.

Follow these pointers and the next time a delicious meatball falls off your fork and onto your shirt and pants, you won’t need to panic and will know just what to do!

Scrape off the excess

Before you try taking on the stain it is important to make sure that you have removed any excess trace of the food that may be left. Keeping around an extra glob of BBQ sauce or puddle of grease will just make it more likely to soak in. Plus when you get to work getting rid of the stain you may just end up grinding it into the fibers.

It’s best to remove that excess right away, even if you can’t take any additional measures at the moment. Using something soft won’t do, instead find something with a stiff edge like a credit card or a butter knife to scrape, not smear, the remains of the stain before you move on to other treatments.

When in doubt, use club soda and water

There are plenty of chemical stain treatment products out there, but before you use a chemical stain cleaner, carefully examine the instructions on both product and clothing. While effective in many instances, some stain cleaning products can have harsh effects if used incorrectly or left on clothes too long. Some will even look to bleach for the toughest stains, but you probably don’t need us to tell you that is a recipe for potential disaster!

Follow instructions closely and also be sure to review the washing instructions on the piece you are cleaning. If it is a more delicate piece you may want to keep it away from these kinds of cleaners all together. Our best advice? When in doubt or you just prefer to play it safe, stick to cold water and club soda as your treatment of choice.

Blot, don’t rub!

Pay close attention to this one, as this is probably the biggest mistake people make when they try to treat stains themselves. Once you’ve got your water or club soda and a tissue or paper towel, the next important thing to do is saturate it in the liquid. But you can’t just go about trying to remove a stain willy nilly any way you like. In fact, you can make matters worse by trying to saturate the stain incorrectly.

Rubbing a stain puts excessive pressure on the stain and won’t absorb the stain as much as it will grind it deeper into the fibers and harder to remove. The key is blotting the stain with gentle dabs, not rubbing or pushing against it. This will successfully soak the area without helping it absorb into the clothing and make it easier to remove with future washing.

Bring it to us

You may be able to get rid of a minor stain or get a good start on treating a bad one on your own, but the best solution to remove food stains is to take it to the dry cleaners as soon as you can. It’s also worth noting that while these treatment solutions will work brilliantly on regular linens and cotton, woven or delicate fabrics may need a more intensive approach to stain removal that you may not have capabilities to do at home.

But we do! Morellis Cleaning has served Indianapolis for over 35 years, tackling the toughest stains that taco night or food truck Fridays can throw at your favorite clothes. Our eight locations can help you get even the worst stains out of your clothes and become a thing of the past, look as fresh and clean as they did when you first purchased them.

Now serving emergencies, Morellis is now offering home and office pickup and delivery services! Give us a call at 317-803-2644 to schedule your stained and spoiled clothes to be picked up by us so we can get them cared for straight away.