Things are looking up

Some of you may have heard about the craziness that this New Year has brought our household. Nothing serious, thankfully, but just a series of annoyances that kept building. A faulty motion sensor set off our burglar alarm about a dozen times in a few days, the mini needing a new radiator, a chipped windshield on the other car, computer trouble, mail trouble, and the list goes on. All of these things are slowly getting resolved.

 

One of the minor annoyances I discovered New Years day, when we brought our Christmas decorations up to Tomu's parents' house, where we currently store them in his old bedroom closet. We have some other things stored there as well, including my collection of porcelain dolls that I had as a girl and we'll give to our girls when they are old enough. While we were storing the decorations I noticed that one of the doll boxes had some water damage. We're not sure exactly where it came from but when I opened the box, the doll clothes were all stained.

 

Fortunately, when I packed them away ages ago, I had carefully wrapped the head, arms, and feet of the doll in plastic, so I didn't have to worry about any damage to the doll itself. But the clothes had some yucky brown staining

 

This apron was the worst. The stains almost looked like coffee.

 

I had read online recently about soaking stained linens in hot water and oxyclean, so I put the doll clothes in my little crock pot with a scoop of oxy and let them sit for a few hours. You can see that the water turned a nice brown. The stains came out of the fabric almost immediately but the lace areas needed longer.

 

After a lot of rinsing, the clothes were perfectly clean and I hung them up to dry.

 

We had to hang them in front of the fireplace because with the recent cold snap, it's the only place in our house with enough warm air to dry anything. This is Amaya's new pose, by the way.

 

Seeing the tiny clothes hung on the line reminded me so much of one of my favorite childhood books, "We Help Mommy," by the amazing Eloise Wilkins.

 

I was thrilled that it worked! I've heard this will also clean up the mysterious stains that show up on baby clothes once they've been stored a while, so maybe I can clean up some of the keepsakes I have from when the girls were tiny. One of the interesting side notes from this "annoyance" is that Rosie saw the doll when I was removing the clothes and was instantly smitten. I may have to put this one on a shelf for her now!