How to Clean Hemp Shoes

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Mike Summers from Jim The Shoe Doctor in Eugene, Oregon. Today we're going to be talking about cleaning a cloth or a hemp shoe. With these shoes you're pretty limited in what you can really do. You can clean them with a mild soap. You would just, with a soft bristle brush, even a toothbrush, apply the soap, you have to get the entire shoe wet, and work the area that is dirty and then clean the entire shoe, and then you would need to rinse it off to make sure you get all of the soap back out of the shoe. There's a number of products that you can buy. The Lincoln E-Z Cleaner is a great product, it's really safe for the shoe, works on many, many different materials. You can use it from leather, clear to silk and satins. It's a safe, easy to use material. But again, you have to get the entire shoe completely wet. You'd apply it either directly to the shoe or with a rag and then you would work the area that was really dirty, that is, if it's the toe area you would work that really good, and then you would just lightly do the rest of the shoe. Just make sure that you get it completely even, you never want to do just a spot because that will show up just as a spot if you do. Once you've got the entire shoe completely covered, then rinse it off and redo the area if it needs to be cleaned further beyond that, and then let the shoe completely naturally dry. You do not want to heat a shoe up to dry it, you could put it over a vent, an air vent in a house if it was not blowing real hot air, but most of the time you just want to let it naturally dry and not in direct sunlight because it will tend to shrink things up. That's how you would clean and protect a cloth shoe."