How To Clean Blueberry Stain From Carpet

I've long accepted that some of the things I love most about summer—ice cream, berries, hot dogs with ketchup—often take a quick turn into stain disaster territory. But last summer started—immediately—with my worst stain yet.

It was Memorial Day weekend, and my boyfriend and I were happily settling into a mini staycation in our New York City neighborhood. After coffee, we walked to the grocery store to stock up on start-of-summer essentials: watermelon, lemonade fixings, ingredients for haddock chowder, a bunch of peonies, and a bag of frozen Maine blueberries. (I was going to make a pie.) As we walked home in the sun I was looking forward to lunch: a tomato sandwich and some potato chips.

When we got home, we put our cloth grocery bags on our (white) couch and started unpacking. After a few trips back and forth to the fridge, I took out the bag of frozen blueberries, and a rush of purple liquid dripped all over my hands and onto the floor. Dreading what I'd find, I picked up the grocery bag and, yes, underneath was a deep, dark purple stain the size of a grapefruit—all over a white sheepskin throw.

photography by laura muthesius, courtesy of our food stories, from kitchen 9 — Above: Photography by Laura Muthesius, courtesy of Our Food Stories, from Kitchen of the Week: A DIY Ikea Country Kitchen for Two Berlin Creatives.

The good news was that the thick sheepskin prevented the blueberry juice from going through to the couch. (A few inches to the left and we would've had a bigger problem.) The bad news was that the sheepskin I'd saved up for and brought back from Stockholm in January now looked like the sheep had gotten a particularly rebellious dye job. Fortunately, the exterior of wool fibers is particularly water-resistant (which I remembered from writing 10 Things Nobody Tells You About the Benefits of Wool), so I knew if I worked quickly and with a great amount of care the stain would, hopefully, come at least partway out. I put everything else down (key to stain treatment: act fast), spread the sheepskin on the floor, and Googled "how to get out berry stains."

As it turns out, the solution, conveniently, is the same ingredient you'd add to make a berry pie: fresh lemon juice. Apparently, the acidity of the lemon juice helps break down the berry juice.

We always have a bowl of half-used lemons in our fridge, from squeezing into seltzers or using the rind for baking, and they were about to come in handy. I grabbed the bowl and, following the directions from experts on Today.com for getting berry stains out of carpets, I got to work.