Rehab Your Old Sneakers With Baking Soda And Detergent

If your tennis shoes are looking kind of crappy thanks to caked-on dirt and other wonderful stuff you’ve picked up over the years, they’re probably due for a cleaning. You could pay for the service or just do it yourself with baking soda and laundry detergent.Photo by Maarten Van Damme

The Converse website demonstrates how it’s done in a fun little video. Basically you wash them by dumping some warm water on them, brush them with a mix of baking soda (bicarb) and laundry detergent, wash them again (a lot), and let them sit overnight with newspaper stuffed inside. That seems to work pretty well, but DIY-on-the-cheap blogger Broke arse Stuart suggests you can just get the job done more easily with some new laces and a magic eraser. We found the magic erasers worked well to clean a laptop keyboard and trackpad, so it seems reasonable that they could clean a shoe as well. Either way, don’t forget to clean the treads, too. You can do that with a pencil!

How to Rehab Your Converse on the Cheap [Broke Ass Stuart]