How do I get dry erase marker stains out of towels?

June 7, 2007 10:30 AM

How do I get dry erase marker stains out of rags/towels?

My students use dry erase boards to play quiz games and I supply them with bar-mop style towels as erasers. The dry erase ink is in the fibers of the towels now - how do I get it out?

posted by Fuka to Education (5 answers total)

I have been told that Murphy's Oil Soap will get dry-erase ink out of fabric but I have not tried this myself (and it seems sort of odd).
posted by winston at 10:41 AM on June 7, 2007

I had decent luck with isopropyl alcohol on a t-shirt when it was a fresh stain.

Also, have you tried dry erase board cleaner? Seems like that might work.
posted by fidelity at 10:53 AM on June 7, 2007

To be clear, are you washing them and not getting results? Most bar towels (i am thinking the kind with 2 pink or blue stripes) are by supposed to (by design, hence the stripes) have the hell bleached out of them. You should be able to find, cheaply at a restaurant supply store, a set of pouches of dry bleach and dry detergent that restaurants use to wash these towels (usually called service towels)

YMMV but when i was a kid i worked at McDonalds and I can assure you that things far worse then dry erase dust and shmaga came out of those towels after a basic wash in hot water with the tough bleach and detergent...
posted by chasles at 11:06 AM on June 7, 2007

Response by poster: Bleach doesn't work on the dry erase stuff - everything else comes out - but the dry erase is literally a year's worth. I'm debating replacing but i'm pretty anal about not throwing things like that out. I'm going to try the oil soap trick and see if that works. (chemically it makes sense)

Thanks.
posted by Fuka at 2:07 PM on June 7, 2007

If the stain is a year old and you've used a dryer to dry the towel for the past year, it's almost impossible to get any stain out. Might as well use it house cleaning or something. I use such rags and old t shirts to clean kitchen floors...wet it and ring the water out, and hook it up on one of those cheap swiffer things and use it with some floor cleaners. Then put it in a bleach mixed water and use it again.
posted by icollectpurses at 4:41 PM on June 7, 2007