I'm Phoebe from Rugs.ie and today I'm going to show you how to get
the dreaded red wine stain out of a wool rug.
So just so everyone is aware, this is a perfect way of getting red wine out of a wool or cotton
rug. But if you have something that is made out of viscose, or jute or sisal then this
is definitely not the approach for you. You need to get that dry cleaned. I'm just going to pour
a little bit of red wine on this sample as if you've spilled a little glass at home.
Ok so the most important thing that you have to do is to dry as much of the area as you
possibly can, as quickly as you can. I am going to use some kitchen paper here but you can also use
any clean cloth. Something un-dyed like this is perfect, try and avoid
a j-cloth or anything that has dye in it as you may transfer the dye back into the rug.
So what you're going to do here is just blot the area as much as you possibly can.
Keep pushing into the pile, trying to remove as much of the liquid as you can. So you keep on
pressing, repeat the process until as much of the red wine comes out. If you're still seeing colour
on the kitchen paper or on the cloth then obviously there's more wine there.
Just keep on keep on blotting until the colour isn't transferring anymore onto the towel.
Now as you can see, you can still see the staining but I've pressed as much of the liquid as I
possibly could out of the pile. The next thing Im going to do is I'm going to use table salt.
And I'm going to cover the area where we have the spill in table salt. So you can
coat this on fairly thick and just making sure that you've got everywhere that it was.
And then I'm going to leave the table salt until some of the colour comes through.
Don't leave it for too much longer than that as salt can be used as a
way of setting dye in rugs too. But this is a great way to get the tannins out of the wine,
to lift the colour a little bit and we'll just vacuum it off as soon as it's done it's job.
So we have just hoovered up the salt that we've put over the stain,
when you're at home leave this a little bit longer than I did. But if you can see,
some of the colour has lifted, but we still have this mark here where the red wine was.
So if that is the case for you aswell, if you haven't caught it quick enough or if you didn't
get that colour out, then we would recommend using either Woolite or non-biological washing powder.
Something that is gentle, because again, this is a wool pile so you don't want it to be too strong
a detergent. Avoid carpet cleaners if possible, or any bleaching agent. So use whatever you would
use on your wool jumpers at home say. I'm just going to dilute this Woolite in some warm water
and then we're going to dab it onto the stain and see if we can get more of it out.
So in this bowl I have some well diluted Woolite in warm water and I've got a clean cloth again
with no dye to make sure I don't transfer any dye onto my wool rug. I'm going to dip this in, get it
liberally wet and then again back to the blotting motion, really pushing
into the pile. And as you can see it's already lifting some of the colour out of the wool.
So I'm going to apply a liberal amount of water, it's ok to get wool wet but it's
not ok to leave it soaking. So just make sure, blotting water in like this is fine,
don't pour a large amount of water into the rug. It will not help. So you can see here the
colour is really coming out of the wool. I just continue this process, repeating over and over.
If there's still colour coming onto your cloth then there's still wine in the rug obviously.
Now don't worry if this little area that you're blotting is getting flat looking,
wool will come back, it's not going to stay flat.
So as you can see, this was the area that I had spilled the red wine on to. What we've
done is we have blotted the area completely, to get as much of the liquid out as we can.
We covered it in table salt and left that until the colour came through, if there
was any remaining red wine on the pile. We then hoovered that up. We diluted Woolite quite well
and then we blotted into the pile in the area that has been stained.
I've dried this mostly but theres is still some Woolite and liquid on it.
I'm going to leave this sit overnight. If the stain is still there, I can repeat the process,
but we will take a look tomorrow and I think most of the staining here is gone.