Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Ring Around the Collar

What is it with men's white shirts?

I spent all those years laundering black clericals, and there wasn't any problem with the necklines. Okay, okay, the white albs had some stains around the neck, but that's why we have amices.

But these white button-down shirts just get terrible at the neck. Why is the white so much worse than the colors? Is it just that it shows more? I keep putting Shout on the necklines when I wash them, but that seems to rough up the fibers so that it wears out faster.

Boy, clergy shirts last a long time and are easy to take care of!

7 comments:

  1. I always have better luck hand-scrubbing the area with a bar of home-made soap, then washing. Sometimes the real soap does a better job than shout - at least for me.

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  2. Something to do with that little scrap of real soap that's left in the shower. I really need to get around to making some more batches of soap...

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  3. The polyester shirts don't get yellow as quickly as the cotton oxfords. Course if the man has a tendency to sweat...poly is NOT a good idea! I use to shout the stains as soon as the shirt came off. Leave it sit all week with the shout on it.

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  4. I didn't realize that, Lisa. The clericals are part cotton and part polyester, but the white shirts he's wearing to work occasionally now are cotton oxfords.

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  5. So, why do we even care about ring-around-the-collar? Who's going to see it?

    Someone once told me that the armpit stains are due not to sweat but to the chemicals from antiperspirant/deodorant. Don't know if that's true or not.

    I spray the Shout and leave it at that. Only so much time in the day!

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  6. If you have it available try Ecover, so far I've been able to get just about anything out with it. I put it on the stain when it goes in the hamper so it sits until I'm ready to do laundry.

    I bet what Cheryl posted about armpit stains is true. I use baking soda as deodorant and don't have any stains even in the shirts that I work outside in.

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  7. Kim, I bet you're right about Cheryl being right. Around here, the people who would sweat enough to have a problem with underarm stains are the people who wear undershirts. But now that y'all mention it, the t-shirts aren't stained either. But we use one of those non-antiperspirant deodorants.

    I've had good luck with keeping stain remover in the bathroom so that stains can be treated as soon as they come off the body (or even before) instead of my trying to notice stains and treat them later when I'm sorting the clothes into piles. Having that extra tube of Shout upstairs has made a world of difference in how well stains come out.

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