I don’t usually keep a tablecloth on the table. First, the table is usually covered with books and papers. Also, the cat thinks our table has been strategically placed so he can both lie down and look out the window and a tablecloth covered in cat fur is really, really gross. However, I do own some white tablecloths I like to use for Thanksgiving. Yes, white.
Four years ago, when getting ready to serve my first Thanksgiving I bought a long, white, 100% cotton hotel-style tablecloth. While white might seem like a poor choice, I would buy it again in a second. Luckily, I don’t need to because the original still looks great. This is not because we haven’t had our share of red wine spills, gravy dribbles, and other potentially tablecloth-ruining dining disasters. I even had a big puddle of spilled candle wax to deal with this morning, but the tablecloth always seems to come through unscathed.
When I googled “remove wax from tablecloth” I found lots of advice and most of it was pretty similar: get any excess wax off with a butter knife, then put something absorbent on both sides of the wax spot and heat with the iron until the wax melts out. Most people suggest using a brown paper bag, and a few recommend using cloth. One smart suggestion was to use unprinted paper towels. This made the most sense to me; to use a brown paper bag you have to find an unprinted section and then cut it down to size, and using cloth seemed silly since you’re just left with more wax-soaked cloth. Plain white paper towels, on the other hand, worked perfectly. I just folded up two paper towels to go between the cloth and the ironing board and two paper towels to go between the iron and the cloth. I put the iron on a medium setting with no steam and just let the heat saturate the paper towels and the tablecloth. When I was finished I could still see the spot where the wax had been, but the cloth was no longer stiff.
I treated the other stains with Shout and tossed the tablecloth into a hot wash with my regular detergent and about 1/4 c. bleach. When the cycle was finished I couldn’t even figure out where the wax had been (or any of the other stains.) The tablecloth will live to see another Thanksgiving.
