Crayons in the Laundry

Several weeks ago, I opened up the dryer to find a load of tye-dyed laundry! Apparently, a crayon was in a pocket and most of the clothes were decorated with red splashes. I should have taken pictures to show the damage! How glad I was that it was a Thursday and not a load of dress clothes!

My first reaction was to just trash the worse of the clothing. I didn't think the crayon would ever come out after being heat set in the dryer and I imagined the crayon rubbing off on future laundry loads, affecting new clothing! After asking several experienced moms, none of whom had a similar experience, I turned to google! There I found moms who had effectively removed it from clothing and a few hints to try.

The worse items were two pairs of Ed's jeans and three little boy's pants. On Ed's jeans, I squirted GooGone on the spots. But this wasn't just a spot or two, these pants looked liked someone had a rough day painting house! So I gave up with the GooGone and filled the washing machine with water and several scoops of OxiClean.

I put all five pants in the washer, left them soak for several hours, then ran the washing machine cycle as usual. When I skeptically pulled the pants out, I was completely shocked to find most of the red decoration gone! Ed's blue jeans and the little boy's pants only had a few very light spots. Ed's other pants were a brown denim of an unusual texture and didn't look as good but they were still far wearable in comparison to what they were a few hours earlier! The inside of the dryer, which was also liberally splashed with red, recovered with some Comet and elbow grease. Who knew that one crayon could give so much color to my world!  But at least the result wasn't permanent!

I hope that none of you have similar dryer surprises, but just in case, I thought I'd share what worked for me! Do you have any practical solutions to household problems? We'd love to hear about it!