I’m having great fun staining silk to see what washes out and how and thanks to all the wonderful people at West Kingdom’s Golden Beltane the list of stains to try has grown even longer.  But just before leaving for Golden Beltane, I stained this ordinary piece of Cotton Candy Silk Damask with marinara sauce from pizza.

 

 

What actually happened is I had decided to try the pizza sauce so I cut out the scrap I wanted to try it on, went in to the kitchen to get some pizza, and my boyfriend was dipping bread sticks in marinara sauce.  I went “Oh, marinara sauce will work!” and stuck my finger in the sauce, scooping out a whopping chunk of it.  He looked at me like “I…I was totally going to dip my bread stick in that…” hung his head in defeat, and looked at the microwave while it finished heating his pizza.

 

So now I had this…

 

 

 

Which I allowed to dry overnight, resulting in this…

 

 

The first thing I did was flip it over so the water was flowing through the back side of the stain, pushing any food chunks back the way they came as I thoroughly rinsed the silk.  This technique works on pretty much all stains.  If you can push em back the way they came then stains seem to life easier.  Next, I dosed the area with Dr. Bronner’s Soap and worked the fabric with my hands, building up a good lather before thoroughly rinsing out the soap.  ***DISCLAIMER*** As with my post on Grease Stains I used a scrap of fabric which had been pre-washed, so I knew there would be no color bleed during this experiment.  If you have not already washed your silk, color test first!

 

And the end result was this…

 

 

Followed by a good ironing to pull up any residual grease stains, of which there were thankfully none (although we now know how to deal with grease stains should they happen 🙂 )

 

 

And that was how I removed marinara sauce from silk.