Nets, curtains and blinds shield your family from prying eyes, keep the cold out on winter nights and protect you from the summer’s heat. By maintaining them carefully, you can extend their life and keep them looking great. There’s a tendency to ignore curtains but, like any other item in your home, they will collect dust, hair and pollution. Regular maintenance will ensure they stay clean and remain an attractive feature of your interior decor.
Here are some cleaning tips for you to follow.
Dusting
- Dust curtains regularly with the upholstery nozzle on the vacuum cleaner to ensure they don’t have to be washed or cleaned quite so often.
- Curtains made from synthetic fabrics attract dust. Use cold salt water to dissolve it.
Washing
- Soak coloured curtains in salt water to prevent fading and to help dissolve dirt.
- Wash delicate curtains by hand in the bathtub with plenty of hand soap or use the detergent recipe (see below).
- Protect net curtains in the washing machine by putting them in a pillowcase.
- Always wash curtains using the machine’s delicate cycle, with plenty of water. That should help reduce the amount of creasing.
- Allow hand-washed curtains to drip dry -- never wring them out. To ensure that they hang properly, weight the bottom edges with clothes pegs before hanging them.
- Stretch out cotton curtains while they are still wet to prevent shrinking, so that they don’t have to be ironed.
- Stiffen net curtains with a 1:3 sugar-water solution added to the last rinse, or put them in water that has been used for boiling rice.
- Give your curtains a wonderful fragrance by adding a few drops of perfume or essential oil to the wash cycle.
Combatting yellowing
- Yellowed net curtains recover their gleaming white colour even without chemical blemished if you soak them in a bicarbonate of soda solution (about 180g bicarbonate of soda in 10 litres of water) before washing them. You can get the same effect by adding a glass of cola or 2-3 denture cleaning tablets to the curtains’ wash cycle. Dry in the sun.
- Salt also helps with this. Simply soak smoke-yellowed curtains overnight in a salt solution (about 500g salt in 10 litres of water) and then wash as usual.
- If older nets lose their whiteness, give them an attractive cream colour instead. Just add an infusion of weak tea to the rinse cycle. The intensity of the colour depends on how long you let the tea steep.
Detergent for curtains
Ingredients:
50g soap
10 litres water
4 tablespoons ammonia
4 tablespoons white spirit
Procedure:
Dissolve the soap in hot water and stir in the ammonia or white spirit. Pour the solution over the curtains laid flat in the bathtub and leave for an hour before rinsing. This is particularly well suited to delicate curtains.
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