Get Stubborn Ink Stains Out Of Clothing With An Unexpected Spice You Already Own

Laundry day is hard enough without difficult stains thrown into the mix. Not only do you have to worry about how to keep your white clothes white and your favorite knits from shrinking, but you also have to pre-treat seemingly impossible-to-remove stains. One such stain is ink. It might get onto your clothes for all sorts of reasons, each more frustrating than the last. Maybe you were busy taking notes at work when your pen began to bleed, and you caught it with your shirt sleeve. Maybe you accidentally got ink on your hands without realizing it, and you brushed your thumb on your collar. Or perhaps a wayward nephew or daughter came up to you with a rogue ink pen and got it all over your pants. But fear not! While this looks like a difficult stain to lift, one pantry ingredient will alleviate seemingly permanent ink blemishes: cream of tartar.

If you're a baker, then you most likely have this in your pantry. It's most often used to help stabilize egg whites in recipes, but it can also be used to help remove ink stains in anything from dress shirts to sweatshirts. If you have a stubborn ink stain you can't get rid of, here's how to use this unassuming product to solve your laundry woes. 

To remove a pesky ink stain with cream of tartar, you need to use the pantry staple more as a pre-treatment rather than a detergent. Grab the stained article of clothing, and put a hand towel or rag underneath where the stain is. That way, when you wet the mark, it won't accidentally saturate the other side of the clothing item. To create the pre-treatment, squeeze half a lemon into a small bowl, followed by 1 to 2 tablespoons of cream of tartar, depending on how big your stain is. Mix it together, and then apply the paste directly onto the stain. Leave it on for three hours, then pop it into the washing machine. Once you remove it, the stain should be gone!

One caveat to keep in mind is not to throw the item of clothing into the dryer until you're absolutely sure the stain is gone. If it's a particularly stubborn mark, it might require another round of pre-treatment, and if you put it in the dryer, the stain will set in.