Today’s post comes from the “Kaitlyn Files.” 🙂
Kaitlyn writes:
When I was a freshman in college I had this candle warmer that always sat on my desk in my tiny dorm room. We weren’t allowed to have open flames, so most of the girls in my dorm used candle warmers to add a nice scent and a little homeyness to our rooms.
If you aren’t familiar with a candle warmer, it’s a little hot plate of sorts that you set a glass jar candle on and it heats up the wax to release the scent. It’s a nifty device! The only drawback is that it melts the entire candle pretty quickly and as long as you leave the warmer turned-on you have a container full of hot wax sitting on your table. Now, this wouldn’t be a problem unless you are a bit of a klutz like me 😉
Like I said, I always had this warmer going when I was in my dorm room. One day I was making my bed and somehow knocked a pillow onto my desk and right into the hot wax. The candle and candle warmer fell off the desk, spilling wax all over the carpeted floor. I about had a heart attack knowing I would have a big repair bill if the carpet was ruined.
Luckily, one of my girl friends knew just what to do to clean up the wax. This simple trick totally saved me!
The technique is almost identical to Jillee’s method for getting stains out of carpet except you don’t use any ammonia. The only tools you need are an iron and a nice, thick stack of newspaper.
Turn your iron on to its hottest setting and turn off the steam function.
Place a piece of newspaper over the wax and then press the iron down onto the paper. I recommend kind of pressing down and moving it around a bit so you don’t burn the paper or the carpet beneath it.
After a few seconds lift the iron and you’ll see that the wax has started to melt into the paper. Once you have a nice spot of wax soaked up, grab a fresh piece of newspaper so you don’t end up melting wax onto your iron.
Repeat the process until all of the wax is lifted out of the carpet.
I feel I should point out that this takes awhile to complete! You have to be patient, but it does work eventually.
For the purposes of this post I dumped some wax on a small carpet remnant and it took me about 30 minutes to get the wax out of that tiny area. And I went through a lot of newspaper!
About halfway through I decided to try using a towel and it actually worked a lot better than the newspaper. If you have some old towels lying around that you don’t mind messing up I would actually use that instead of newspaper. But the beauty of the newspaper is that you don’t have to ruin any towels. It just takes a bit longer because it’s not as absorbent.
