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Cathy asked: How do I clean white tree flocking from fabric? My sister and I decorated an eight foot, live Christmas tree that was flocked for the Vancouver Rotary’s Festival of Trees a couple of weeks ago. I wore a 50% nylon/50% polyester light cover up because of the cold where we were and got the tree flocking all over it. It did not come out when I washed it. I only hung it up to dry, but the stuff is still stuck all over it. It I too tedious to just pick it off, and it doesn’t just brush off! I appreciate any help.
Tree 
flocking can be made of a few different things, cellulose perhaps most common, but no matter what the ingredients, this trick will remove a great bit of it from your clothing.
You Will Need:
- Lint roller or
- Wide packing or duct tape
Steps to Remove Flocking:
- Roll the lint roller over the surface of the fabric or wrap a strip of tape around your hand, sticky side out, and pat the fabric.
- As the surface picks up flocking, replace the roller sheet or get a new strip of tape.
- If you try a lint roller or another weak tape first and it does not fully remove the flocking, try a stronger tape like duct tape.
- Continue until all the flocking has been cleaned up.
Additional Tips and Advice
- To pack a bigger punch, try Gorilla Tape from the makers of Gorilla Glue.
- If necessary, turn the fabric over and work from the inside. This tactic may help you get the last stubborn bits of flocking off the clothing.
- If the above trick still isn’t removing all the flocking, try using a fabric shaver.
After accidentally washing a J.Jill catalog in a large load of cotton sweaters, jeans, dark towels and a few pair of nylon panties, when I opened the washing machine, it was quite a surprise. It looked like little cotton balls everywhere, and they were literally stuck to everything. The black nylon panties had a gray cloudy look. And nothing would come off the damp clothes.
By the way, I only found out what I’d done when I found a few pages of the catalog that were stuck together and still readable. It was astounding that a little mail catalog could generate that much mess.
I got virtually all of it off by a two-step process. First, I put small loads from that large load into the dryer, and ran it in ten-minute intervals, clearing the overflowing lint trap each time, before I started it again. When all that was done and everything was dry, I washed it all again in a large load, and dried in the same way in small batches, but this time using softener sheets for their anti-static capability.
The second run generated a lot less lint, and I wound up drying each of those small dryer loads with longer runs. The result was virtually all of the lint gone. What was left I could brush off with my hand.
The amount of lint that came off in total was astounding. Also, it was soft and pretty white lint; I was tempted to save it to experiment with paper making. (But decided no, I don’t need one more project.)
This weekend I’m going to pull out the dryer, just to make sure that no lint escaped the process. Lint is the cause of dryer fires, so it seems like the right time to check.