Share your sheet wisdom please

[Cari3]

I like to provide good quality sheets thinking people will take better care of them.  I will no sooner have bought new sheets when they are stained.  Like the guy who thought it was a great idea to slather his entire body with self-tan before he went to bed....a delightful full body yellow stain.  It's definitely not uncommon for guests to put cream on before bedtime - more oily stains, nor is it uncommon for them to eat in bed and spill stuff.  A friend said I should spray stains with lighter fluid because it takes care of everything!  What?  That doesn't sound good or healthy to me.  We pride ourselves in being an eco-friendly airbnb and in fitting with that value I don't use store bought cleaners.  I make all my own non-toxic cleaners.  In line with that eco-friendly value, I most definitely don't want to be throwing away sheets to fill landfills and to keep factories pumping them out.  I want to keep our footprint as small as possible.   But how do you take out oil stains in an eco-friendly way?  Or what do you suggest we do to discourage cream-loving guests?   

[Ilana85]

Hello Sarah. I run an air bnb in Fiji where it's hot most of the year, just dry and wet seasons. So far, I've used white cotton sheets and white bath towels for the bnb.  But of course the white sheet was stained once . I'm wondering, do you or anyone in this group recommend colored sheets to avoid stains and what shade of color, dark,medium or light??

Note, there is one good store in my.city here that supplies linen for all hotels in Fiji, that's where I buy my linen from. Look.forward to advice about the best color sheets And towels to invest in..Thanks 🙂

[Sarah977]

@Cari3  Well, if you sew, or have a friend who does, you can usually get enough unaffected fabric out of a stained sheet to fashion into pillocases, which are quick and easy to make. 

I have to say, smearing dye all over one's skin just so you'll "look" tan, is a bizarre concept to me.

[Cari3]

I’m totally with you...it like if acne cream takes the bleach out of fabric, why would you want to put it on your face?  And yup...I totally don’t get the smearing dye one oneself to look tan.  Us humans we really are a great bunch!

[Branka-and-Silvia0]

@Cari3 

acne cream doesn't stain the fabric, it bleaches the color and that's the problem.

I bought a few gray towels, I thought stains will not show as much as on white towels, but after less than a month they all had bleached stains so we are back to white.

For the same reason, I would not recommend colored sheets except those with a printed pattern. Printed fabric can not be bleached out, but dyed fabric can.

[Cari3]

I also tried gray facecloths and gave up on those because of the bleaching out problem.  And you’re right, once something has bleached out the color, nothing is going to restore it.  So it would make sense to look for printed fabric, thanks for this.  

[Susan151]

@Cari3  Only towels I have ever "lost" were stained with that horrid fake tanner stuff. Nasty, nasty, nasty stuff. I imagine that sheets are just as prone to this stuff as well.

I didn't know how difficult it was to remove, so I may have dried the towels before the stains were totally removed and set them in place. My husband uses those two towels. He knows that they are clean.

[Cari3]

That’s what also drives me crazy....I could use them knowing they are totally clean except that they don’t go with the decor in our room at all (the new turquoise ones I bought). I KNOW my sheets are clean, but a guest might look at these stains and question it.