In Which We Machine Wash a Favorite Leather Jacket

My son normally keeps his bedroom door closed. He doesn't want to accidentally close a cat or dog in the room and come back to a puddle. Smart thinking I say. Unfortunately on the extremely rare occasion of having left the door open someone with four legs and a tail left a puddle for him, on his bed, with the door wide open and access to the proper place for that unhampered. Needless to say he was a very unhappy camper. To make matters worse his favorite leather jacket was on the bed.

We spot cleaned the jacket, stripped the bed and sprayed a peroxide and baking soda mix on the mattress. By morning the bed was fine and freshly washed sheets were in place. The jacket on the other hand stunk to high heaven and was discolored too. The discoloration I'm thinking was cleaning residue.

Sad and still a bit angry he started calling dry cleaners looking for someone to clean his jacket. No leather cleaners in the state, the dry cleaners would have to ship it out of state and he would be charged a minimum of $50 regardless of whether or not the jacket came back clean. They told him the jacket was garbage, just toss it.

You all know I've spent a fair amount of time on Pinterest. In my Pinterest travels I came across one of my new favorite blogs One Good Thing by Jillee. She has compiled a wondrous amount of useful info in her blog and I remembered a very recent post about cleaning leather. I instructed Alex to get on my computer and head to her blog to search for that post. Her post said she cleaned her leather purse using Castile Soap. Lucky us I just happened to have a bottle of Castile Soap on the shelf.

Over to the washing machine we went castile soap in one hand, stinky jacket in the other. Following Jillee's directions we washed the jacket while I gathered towels for a second load. After a brief drying on gentle with some fluffy towels we hung the jacket up to finish drying.

Alex thought he caught a slight whiff of the nasties so I directed him to hang his jacket out in the fresh air for a little while. Something about line drying makes everything smell so good I figured it couldn't hurt. The skies started clouding up so Alex brought it back inside and …… no smell, not even a hint of the nasties.

The favorite leather jacket is clean, smells good and is still soft and supple. Alex waited until it was absolutely dry and gave it a nice wipe down with some leather conditioner to be on the safe side, but that jacket looks and smells just like new!

Thanks to a slight Pinterest obsession and a newly beloved Blog, we saved the favorite jacket that everyone else had deemed garbage! Thank you Jillee!

And thank you for stopping by!
We'll see you next time!