I was not ready to give in just yet and buy new ones so I searched the land of ideas, pinterest. I found several tutorials that ranged from throwing them in the washing machine to hand scrubbing them. I decided to do my own combination and here's what worked and what didn't...
I filled the sink up with COLD water and added a little Seventh Generation laundry detergent. I emphasis COLD because you don't want any part of your shoe shrinking.
I used a combination of Seventh Generation dish soap and Seventh Generation stain remover to treat the grease stain. I then used an old tooth brush to scrub that spot and gently scrub the rest of the shoes.
Everyone online says to take out the laces to wash them separately, but honestly I'm pretty sure I would not be able to lace them up again if I did, so in they stayed. I just sprayed them with the stain remover and scrubbed them with the tooth brush.
Once I was done scrubbing, I rinsed them under the faucet and put them on a towel to dry. That's one thing every tutorial agreed with, do NOT put them in the dryer, let them air dry. I then stuffed the toes with paper towels so they would keep their shape while drying.
Ewww they were soo dirty...
Now here's the part that wasn't so good....
Once they dried there were noticeable whitish spots. It seems the places I scrubbed the hardest, like where the grease stain was, were much lighter now. I scrubbed the color right off! There were also some areas on the sides that were lighter too. These seem to be the spots that had the most wear and tear on them and when the dirt came off well that was it, there was no color left underneath.
So if I had to do this again, I would not do any scrubbing, or at least very light scrubbing..the tooth brush was a bad idea. Lesson learned and now they are just really worn, but really clean weekend/work shoes.
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