Skip to main content

A Cheap Fix – How to Make a Scorched Shirt Go Back to White

Whether by flash or by dryer, you can easily scorch shirts, which means the top hairs are slightly burned and give it a tan cast. If it is anything but a white shirt, the shirt is ruined. Don’t waste your time trying to fix it. Very slight scorching is very hard to see unless you have good light, it is a good reason to have good lighting at your unload stations and the ends of your dryer.

If it is a white shirt and it is mildly scorched and not outright burned, you can make a solution of half hydrogen peroxide solution and water and spray it on the shirt and it will bleach it back to white if you are lucky.

I’ve had people tell me “that isn’t bleaching.”

Wikipedia (which is sometimes wrong, but I think is right in this case) says otherwise.

“Bleach refers to a number of chemicals which remove color, whiten or disinfect, often by oxidation.

The bleaching process has been known for millennia, but the chemicals currently used for bleaching resulted from the work of several 18th century scientists. Chlorine is the basis for the most commonly used bleaches, for example, the solution of sodium hypochlorite, which is so ubiquitous that most simply call it “bleach”, and calcium hypochlorite, the active compound in “bleaching powder”. Oxidizing bleaching agents that do not contain chlorine most often are based on peroxides, such as hydrogen peroxide…”

Don’t use “bleach” to do this, sodium hypochlorite should not be put in the air as mist.

Don’t think of mixing your own hydrogen peroxide, buy the household version that is typically in solution at 3% to 6%. In its pure form hydrogen peroxide is literally rocket fuel.

Do think of mixing your own solution to remove scorching and putting it in your own spray bottle, as a quick check of pricing has commercial screenprinting channels selling a 16 ounce bottle for about $12 and if you make your own solution of 16 ounces for less than $3 and by the case probably under $1.

Comments

Leave a comment