We've all had it happen to us. Oh, man! My FAVORITE t-shirt! And it's got a big ol' stain on it. What do I do now, throw it in the TRASH?
Well, hold on there, partner. Before you take any such drastic steps as that, try washing it first. There are many sites out there in the wide world's web providing helpful hints on how to get stains out using various pre-treatment products or lemon juice and/or what-not. I don't need to get into that here. Go, check out the methods available, make an informed decision, and see if you can't get that stain out. If you can, great! You need read no further.
All of that's assuming the shirt has not already been washed. Because the one thing that everybody says is in total agreement: once you wash it...that stain is "set." As in, you're stuck with it. So I never wash a shirt with a stain until I'm sure I can get that stain out. But yet, I'm hesitant to try these weird pink or blue pre-treatment liquids, since if I splortch that stuff all over the stain and rub it in all around, and the stain doesn't disappear like magic - then what have I got? An even bigger stain! With like, coffee in the middle, and surrounded by a colorful soapy patch that will dry looking even worse!
So what to do, then?
What I find is that in practice, you can always wear a shirt a couple few extra times while it's still basically "clean" (stains aside). Right? And after a stain dries, it looks the same whether it happened this morning or a year ago. Right? People can't really tell the difference. So, who's going to fault you for what could clearly be passed off as this morning's simple accident? We're all human, right? It happens to us all, right? So as you will see, in practice, all you need to do is have a little presence of mind and you can keep on wearing that favorite shirt!
The key is to maintain "plausible deniability." Where are you going in that shirt? If it's just out and about to a party or wherever, it's perfectly plausible to explain the stain away as if it had happened earlier that day: "oh, damn coffee at breakfast!" Who's going to blame anyone for that? - what with today's hectic breakfast lifestyles, hash being slung and coffee being drunk thick and fast? Accidents will happen, and you're not always able to nip back home for a clean shirt. Note that this statement: "oh, damn coffee at breakfast!" is not technically a lie. It might not even be technically a sentence. But taken by itself, you could easily be damning the poor quality of coffee at breakfast in general. Still. That's a side point, because the real point is that the spill may have happened at breakfast weeks ago, and it would be a true statement! But people are going to assume you meant today's breakfast. Ideal for our purposes!
A wide range of stains end up looking plausibly enough like coffee, so that's usually the line I use. But for the stains that can't pass, "oh, damn mustard at lunch!" or "oh*, damn spaghetti-o's!" will work almost as well in a pinch. "Damn spaghetti sauce" is pushing it, since that sounds more like last night's dinner than something that happened earlier that same day. You can only abuse people's credulity to a point.
So anyway: like I said, if you're just going out and about, you ought to be able to fake your way through plausibly. But if you're going in to work, where everybody has already seen that damn stain a number of times already, the subterfuge won't hold up.
You're just going to need to exercise some judiciousness.
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