So many of us these days love candles on our table especially on special occasions or romantic dinners and even when you have a candelabra or a dish to put them on they always seem to find a way to drip onto your tablecloth. Sometimes dinner guests can knock a candle over spilling the hot wax everywhere, but don’t despair we have some tips and tricks to help all you candle lovers out there.

I am a definite candle lover and I also love either a black or white tablecloth, my first reaction used to be either go to a dry cleaner or cover up the stain by a dish or yet more candelabras. Most dry cleaners can’t remove the stain and I ended up with so many stains I couldn’t keep covering them up without losing vital table space!

I knew I had to get to grips with this problem so with much research I wanted to pass on my handy tips for wax removal as they’ve been tried and tested, and they actually do work.

Some of what I’m about to say next will seem absurd and bizarre but you need to trust me on this, just follow these simple steps and your wax stain is solved.

• Before you start to clean the tablecloth, stick it in the freezer, this will harden the wax making it easier to remove.
• Think of a natural way to remove wax, there are some chemical solutions out there but a few are so strong they remove the colour from your cloth.
• Whilst your tablecloth is freezing prepare the following, a spoon, scissors, clean brown bag, a clean rag/tea towel, an iron and some washing up liquid
• After an hour or so in the freezer remove your tablecloth and peel/scrape off as much of the hard wax as you can, the easiest way to do this is with a spoon!
• Then cut the brown paper bag into squares roughly two times bigger than the wax stain, place the clean rag/tea towel over the ironing board, the rag will stop the wax from staining your board.
• Then place your tablecloth over the rag, place the brown paper squares underneath your tablecloth where the stain is and over it.
• Then plug in your iron and using a medium heat setting run it over the brown squares until you see oil spots appearing on the paper, changing the paper squares from time to time until there are no more oil spots appearing.
• Your tablecloth is now ready for cleaning, we suggest you treat the spots first by using a bit of diluted washing up liquid or a detergent such as ‘Vanish’ working the stain gently with your fingers or a brush until the stain is reduced in colour.
• Then wash your tablecloth in your machine using your normal detergents on the hottest wash your fabric can bear, hang to dry and avoid using a dryer.
• When the tablecloth is dry if there are still bits of wax remaining, you guessed it repeat the process all over again!