Anyone with children has had Kool-Aid spilled on them at one time or another. The key to keeping your clothing intact is to learn how to get the Kool-Aid stains out of your clothing effectively. Because Kool-Aid is so heavily pigmented, Kool-Aid stains are legendarily difficult to remove. Red stains in particular are one of the hardest colors to get out of fabric. Red Kool-Aid binds to the fibers of the fabric and makes it difficult to get the stain completely out of the t-shirt.
If the shirt is white, the easiest thing to do is to apply a small amount of bleach to the affected area. You can do this by pouring bleach into the cap and then pouring it over the stain. The bleach will have to sit for 15 minutes or more before you will see very much improvement in the stain. After that time, if the bleach has not taken the stain out of the t-shirt, try rinsing the bleach out and beginning again.
If the t-shirt is a different color, it will be much more complicated to get the red stain out of the fabric. How well the stain comes out generally depends on how quickly you start treating the fabric. To begin with, try to rinse out as much of the stain as you can. Put the stained area of the fabric under the faucet and run cold water straight through the t-shirt. This will loosen up the Kool-Aid that has not bonded with the fabric.
Once you have rinsed the area, you can start pre-treating it. This is an important step before you wash the t-shirt. You have a much greater chance of getting the stain out if it is treated before putting it through the laundry. There are many pre-treatment sprays, sticks and liquids that you can use to try to get the rest of the Kool-Aid out of the fabric. Apply one of these treatments and let the t- shirt sit flat for at least as long as recommended on the pre-treatment package.
If this doesn’t completely remove the stain, it will at least lighten it quite a bit if the stain is new. Once you have done this, you may need to rinse the pre-treatment substance away from the t-shirt. Read the directions to find out whether you must rinse it before laundering the shirt. If not, you can put directly into the laundry.
When you do wash the t-shirt in the laundry, be sure to use only cold water. If there is any part of the stain still lingering, using hot water will bind it completely to the fabric and make it extremely difficult to ever lighten it again. If you use cold water and the t-shirt comes out of laundry with some of the stain still left on it, you can try pre-treating it and laundering it again for better results. You may find that after two or even three times of pre-treating and washing, the stain is removed completely from the t-shirt.