10 Comments
Whether you wear a baseball cap for work or play, there may come a time that it needs a bit of cleaning. Today Britta is going to help us out with this tricky cleaning situation!
Britta writes…
My husband Neil is a line cook at a local restaurant, and his everyday “uniform” includes wearing a hat. As you can imagine, the combination of sweat, smoke, and kitchen grease has not been kind to his work hats over time.
When he brought them to me, they looked pretty sad and dingy, and they didn’t smell great either. But he loves those hats, so I assured him I would find a way to give them the TLC they deserved.
What I came up with is a simple method that will not only get your baseball hats clean, but it will also minimize any color-loss or warping. And you’ll be able to do it in just a few minutes!
What you’ll need…
- a bucket
- OxiClean
- a stain pre-treating stick
I started by applying a stain stick to the inside of the headband, where the sweat stains were the most apparent. I also applied it the stain stick to any spot that looked particularly grimy.
After letting the pretreatment soak in for a minute or two, I filled a bucket with cold water (to help protect the color on the hats), and added two scoops of OxiClean powder and stirred the water a bit to help it dissolve.
More Ideas You'll Love
Then one at a time, I dunked the hats into the bucket, using my fingers to work the soap into the fabric. After a minute or two of this, the water had become a murky, light brownish color. (Gross, but it showed the hat was coming clean!)
After a few minutes of dunking and scrubbing the hat, I brought it over to the sink and rinsed it under cold running water. I paid extra attention to rinsing the parts that I had pretreated, to make sure there wasn’t any residue left over.
After rinsing, I used a couple of clean kitchen towels to blot any excess water off of the hat, especially in the band area where there is more fabric.
To help the hat keep its shape while it dried, I placed the hat on an upturned jar. (It’s important to let your hats air-dry to avoid shrinking or warping.)
That’s all there is to it! It took me only 15 minutes or so to wash both hats, and they look so much better than they did before.
More Ideas You'll Love
And best of all – they actually smell clean! Had I known that cleaning them would be so easy, I would have done it a long time ago! :-)
