How to Clean Converse

   Hi guys! My name's Trinity, and that's all you're gonna get. For my first post, I'm just going to skip all the introductions and just get into this blog. You'll know more about me as I post more anyways, so...On with the post!
 

   For the sake of my sanity, I'll be calling these "Converse" throughout the post, even if they are made by Air Walk. Okay? Okay. (TFiOS reference!!!! XD) Above is a picture of my "Converse" the day I got them. Pretty beautiful, right? Whelp, now they're trash. But I'm gonna clean them anyway, because I don't have any other shoes! *Fake enthusiasm*

    Here are my shoes: grimy, disgusting, and filthy. My goal is to get them white again and clean off all of the dirt and whatever else is on them. So, this picture doesn't really show how bad they are. If my shoes looked like that in reality, I probably wouldn't clean them until they got worse. So, I have some side pictures to express how dirty they actually are.

    To start this tutorial off, you're going to need paper towel, nail polish remover, and, of course, your shoes. It took me about 1 hour to scrub my shoes, but the time may vary on how much patience you have and also how well you want your shoes to be clean.

    Starting off, you're going to want to take a full piece of paper towel and fold it. I like to fold it into eighths so it can absorb the nail polish remover.

    This is how it should look if you fold it into eighths.

    Put the paper towel on the top of the nail polish remover and make sure you secure the paper towel with your finger so the nail polish remover doesn't spill everywhere.

    Gradually tip the bottle upside-down to soak the paper towel.

    You do not need to pour the nail polish remover out. You should have a circle on your paper towel like so.

    Now's the part where you start cleaning! Place the spot of nail polish remover onto the toe of your Converse and start scrubbing away. Make sure you only get the rubber part of your Converse!

    Once the nail polish remover dries, apply more to the paper towel until the toe of your shoe is clean.

    Nastiness. Once you run out of room, grab another piece of paper towel and repeat the process.

    This picture was just to show you how much grime I got off of just the toe of my shoe.

    This piece of paper towel is shot, so I grabbed another one and started to clean the rubber part in the front. For this part, I only wanted to have a half-piece of paper towel, so I can dig my thumbnail into all the nooks and crannies.

   Here is where the time starts to vary. You can either choose to a) Just clean the surface of it and not clean the ridges in between, which saves A LOT of time or b) Clean the surface and ridges to make the shoe look A LOT cleaner. For this tutorial, I chose the second option and cleaned everything. (Here is where having a thinner piece of paper towel is significantly easier.)

    This was before I cleaned all the ridges and had just scrubbed the surface. See all the dirt still caked on in between the diamonds?

    The right side of my shoe is the part of the shoe where I cleaned the ridges and everything, while the left is the side where I just cleaned the surface. The difference is astounding, isn't it? XD

    Second piece is shot, so on with the third piece!

    This is another picture with a different angle of the difference between cleaning the ridges or not.

    As you can see, the right shoe is very white already compared to the other shoe. This really shows you how much this works.

    Now clean the sides. This part is relatively easy compared to the other parts of the shoe.

    There it is, EXTREMELY cleaner.

    Again, the difference of the two shoes.

    So much cleaner. Looks as white as it was when I first got it!

    My friend likes to call my shoes "fake Converse" since they're made by Air Walk. XP

    The contrast of the fronts.

    The contrast of the sides.

    As pictured above, I went through quite a bit paper towel.

    Close up of the cleaned front. You can see that close up, it's still not completely clean, because of all the nicks and permanent stains.

    Repeat all the above steps to the other shoe, and you'll have a pair of Converse that are beautifully white again!

    Some victory pics must be taken.

    Now, this next part is optional, but since my laces are really dirty and stained, I decided that I should probably treat them with stain-remover to make my shoes look even better. This is a picture of the removed laces.

    I know this reminder might be a little late, but open a window or two to let the room you were in breathe from all that smelly nail polish remover.

    The stain-remover that my mom had for our laundry is Tide. Make sure that you have a clean surface that won't be harmed if the remover spilled. Remember, this stuff is toxic, so make sure you watch your mixture if you have younger siblings.

    I filled the scoop up about a quarter of the way and dumped it into a bucket.

    I then filled the bucket up with COLD water.

    Mix up the water and detergent so it dissolves.

    Place the shoe laces in there. Now, I put my shoe laces in there for about two hours, but you can get away with them being in the mixture for an hour.

    I realized after the two hours that I should probably scrub them, so I found a brush that my mom uses to get the stains out of our laundry. I scrubbed them raw, but it was totally worth it. After your shoelaces are done soaking, dump out your bucket and rinse off your laces with cool water to get all the stain-remover out. Hang them over a shower rod and something like that so they can dry.
   My Converse look amazing now compared to what they were before. I'm sorry that I'm too lazy to take more pictures, but trust me, they're fabulous. I hope this tutorial helped you, and I can't wait to make more posts! Thanks for reading my little blog here, and comment below if you tried this tutorial on your own shoes! :)