We came home from a weeklong vacation earlier this week, and I started in on a mountain of laundry after unpacking. I made it to the fourth and final load before disaster struck: a crayon made it into the wash undetected, and I had pink wax on a freshly dried load of clothes - and all over the inside of my dryer.
I stared at my hot pink streaked clothes and dryer for a minute, and then I did what I think a lot of us do when we're faced with an unpleasant task: I put a post up on Facebook to avoid scraping and scrubbing for a few minutes. And it's lucky I did, because it turns out Macaroni Kid Rockville-Gaithersburg's publisher Lani has the magic formula for getting crayon out of both clothes AND dryer (thanks to a blue crayon incident at her own house).
What you'll need:
Dawn dish soap
White vinegar (optional)
Your laundry detergent of choice
Dryer sheets
Tennis balls (or old socks rolled into balls)
Step one: let's fix those clothes
To get crayon out of your washed and dried clothes, put them back in your washer with two tablespoons of Dawn, your regular detergent, and a cup of white vinegar.* Let it soak in the hottest water you can get out of your washing machine for about 25 minutes, then wash it in that same mixture. Repeat until there is no more crayon left on your clothes.
* I didn't have vinegar on hand, so I washed my pink-smeared laundry without it. It took me three trips through the wash to get it out, but it is possible to skip the vinegar and still get the crayon out.
Step two: clean out the dryer
Getting the crayon out of the clothes was the easy part - the dryer was the real challenge! Scrape all the wax you can out of the dryer. After I did this, I was left with stubborn pink streaks that wouldn't come off. Not magic eraser, not glass cooktop cleaner (a popular online suggestion), not a scrub brush could get that pink out of my dryer.
Put three dryer sheets in your dryer, and add 3-4 tennis balls or old balled up socks. Turn your dryer to its highest setting and let it run. It took two dryer cycles, but every bit of pink residue was gone after I tried this trick.
