You knew it was coming, right? 🙂 I mean, with all of this blueberry experimenting that I’ve been doing lately (which you can read about here and here), I was bound to end up with a blueberry stain! The kicker is that I even wore an apron!! Oh well, my stain-fighting skills renewed, I have since learned how to remove blueberry stains from clothing …  a tip I’m happy to pass along to you.

So, as I mentioned, I was careful to wear an apron while messing about in the kitchen, because I knew I would be making a mess. At some point (after removing the apron, of course!), I must have brushed up against the counter, which still had blueberry juice on it, transferring the juice onto a new T-shirt.

I didn’t notice the stain until almost bedtime, when one of the kids asked me what I got on my shirt. I looked down, and there it was, a dark purple stain across my belly. Yeesh! It probably would have been helpful to deal with the stain right away, but at that moment, I was too tired to think about handling one more mess, so I set the shirt aside until the next day.

Turns out, my techniques for how to remove blueberry stains from clothing weren’t too complicated, so I could have dealt with it right then. Here’s what I did (when I finally got around to it!).

Step 1: Pour boiling water over the stain. I got this tip from my mom, who gave a 4-H demonstration on stain removal when she was a girl. (I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, because here I am, many years later, sharing tips on stain removal.) Her slogan was this: “Boiling water removes all stains except peach, plum, pear, and cherry.” Well, my stain wasn’t peach, plum, pear, or cherry, so I decided to give the boiling water technique a try.

As you can see, the boiling water removed all but the darkest stain. The boiling water might have removed that, too, if I had noticed the stain right away and taken care of it immediately. (Note to self: deal with stains right away!) But…I didn’t, so on to step 2.

Step 2: Pour hydrogen peroxide onto the stain. I was working with a white T-shirt, so I wasn’t too concerned about the colors of the shirt fading. If you try this tip with a colored shirt, be careful not to expose the hydrogen peroxide to sunlight, which can fade the color. You might also want to just dab the stain lightly instead of pouring on the hydrogen peroxide, as I did with the white shirt.

Step 3: Walk away. (I love this step!) I let the hydrogen peroxide soak into the stain for a few hours, and when I returned, the stain was all gone!

Step 4: Wash as usual. Of course, I already knew that the stain was gone, but it’s so satisfying to put a clean shirt in the drawer instead of adding it to the “rag bag,” don’t you think?