DIY Cleaning vases

Many of my friends & family always ask me how I get everything done in a day that I have to do & let me tell you it is not easy, but I do enjoy every minute of it, usually :)

Some people think that wedding planning is all fun & games, love & laughter, & weeping happy tears all day, and although that is part of what we get to enjoy we also have many other things that factor into our day. Besides running a daycare all day from 6 am - 6 pm, keeping up the house, the yard, helping my husband in the field, taking care of my 3 little munchkins, & planing weddings - I also have A LOT of prep work to do in regards to the weddings we decorate for. Cleaning vases is a BIG part of that prep work. We spend hours cleaning all our vases after each wedding & prepping them for the next up coming wedding. In this blog I will show you some of the ways we have found to work out well for us to clean the vases, getting dried candle wax out of them & getting stickers off new vases.

Windex

I don't know a decorator that doesn't go to an event without Windex - it  is a no brain er  We have to Windex EVERY SINGLE vase we have before they go out for any event. Nos pots, fingerprints, dried wax, residue from previous candles being lit or water marks allowed on them. so Windex them shiny

Heat Treat

We use this method for removing dried up candle wax from the inside of vases & also getting those stickers off of brand new vases & it works slick as spit.

Here you can see we got some new tea light holders that we need to get all those stickers off them. 

What we do is heat the the oven to 175 degrees & put your vases in the oven for about 5-10 minutes. Remove one by one with a pot holder & just tear the stickers off. They come off clean with no sticky residue left behind - perfect!!! You can do the same thing for say votive holders that have dried up candles in them. Another treatment we use for a lot of dried up candle wax in the containers is to boil water on the stove & either dip the containers in the water briefly or pour some of the boiling water into the container. The boiling water will break the candle wax free.

Wash & Be Done

I use my dishwasher  a lot when cleaning my containers & my mirrors - yes it works great!!! I just put my mirrors, or my freshly clean of wax containers in the dishwasher, turn it on & let the dishwasher work it's magic. Make sure to have the heated dry cycle on, not the energy saver dry cycle otherwise you will have to hand dry each item & when you have as many to clean each week as I do trust me you don't have time for that. Wash & be done.

Freeze it off

Many decorators use the Freezer treatment when they are trying to remove the candle wax from their containers, we have not had as much luck with that as we have the heat treatment, but give it a try if you so wish. Just place the containers int he freezer & let them freeze solid & the candles supposedly just pop right out of there.

Just today alone I cleaned 56 cylinder vases, 136 candelabra glass votive holders, 488 votive holders, 48 mirrors, & removed the stickers off of 144 new containers....& that was only part of my day. Tomorrow I have more to clean to get ready.

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Happy Cleaning! If anyone has any other great tips please share with us.