I recently picked up a pair of white converse shoes at a garage sale for $2. They were filthy dirty but my 14 year old daughter insisted that I buy them so that we could match since she has a pair of her own. Who can say no to being a "twinsie" with their teen daughter? Not me, that's who. So I picked the shoes up in the hopes that I could revive them from their dingy dirty state that they were in to a clean looking white pair the way God intended. Or at least, the way Converse intended them to look.
It's hard to get a really good look at the before and after, but I think they cleaned up really nicely. In fact, I'm pretty darn impressed with myself and wanted to share my tricks with you. It's nearly impossible to keep white shoes looking white for long, so if you own a pair of white canvas shoes, this cleaning technique may be your new go to.
I started by removing the laces in my shoes. I could buy a new pair of white laces for a few bucks but I'm cheap and I like to salvage what I have, so I decided to take my laces out and see if I could make them look new again. I ended up putting them in a small plastic bowl filled with a mixture of the same cleaning concoction that I will be telling you about. It worked great and the laces looked new again too!
I have a sink in my laundry room, but if you don't you could use a bucket. I put a quarter scoop of Oxiclean, a quarter cup of laundry detergent and a cap full of bleach into my sink filled with about a gallon of cold water. You want to use cold water so that you don't set any of your stains. I used my toothbrush to swish and mix around my cleaning mixture.
Use your toothbrush to start scrubbing. I started with the rubber around the edges
and then worked my way up to the canvas.
I scrubbed the shoe on the left and hadn't gotten to the shoe on the right yet. You could soak your shoes upside down in your cleaning bath for a bit if the stains are really set in. I actually didn't have the time to do that and think that the end result still turned out great.
I took my toothbrush and dipped it into another scoop full of my Oxiclean. I used that to scrub around the canvas on my shoes before I threw them into my washing machine. I washed the shoes on cold with a small amount of liquid bleach and a little bit of laundry detergent.
Once the shoes are washed, you don't want to dry them in your dryer, you want to let the sun do the final step of whitening them. I read that some people find that their canvas shoes turn yellow as they dry in the sun. I didn't want that, so I took paper towels, wet them down until they were moist and laid them on top of the canvas.
After a few hours, your shoes will be dry and they will look almost as good as new!
I was really impressed with the process and have no idea why I almost didn't buy this pretty sweet looking pair of Converse. I'm so glad my daughter talked me into it. Now we can be twinning!
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