Cleaning shoes and how to stop your wax cracking

 If you clean your shoes just for the sake of it, not minutes before you are due to go out, of when you have just been out and got them all muddy or covered with some disgusting material, not that I count mud as disgusting, it will bring great satisfaction.

From a young age, my father when getting me up in the mornings, would get me to clean my shoes.  He often cleaned his own at the same time.  In the tropics when your shoes can go 'mouldy' overnight under your bed, it was essential to have this daily maintenance.  We didn't have several pairs of shoes, just the one pair for school, one for best, and rubber flipflops.

I don't remember my younger siblings being involved.  My father said caring and looking after your clothes, was a habit he picked up in the army.  When I clean my shoes I thank my father for having instilled in me the pleasure of looking after what you have.

Today I cleaned both pairs of my Un Loops, Mr S's shoes and my walking boots.  The black and brown pairs of brushes date back to my school days. Yes spit does work! 

One of the great gripes I have had with tins of shoe polish is that the wax soon goes hard and cracks.  When I say soon, I mean perhaps after a couple of years.  Once the wax goes that way it is difficult to use. When I had a gas cooker, I would gently warm up the wax till it melted.  Ideally the whole tin should last till the very end.  The culprit is evaporation! If you find a tiny hole in the lid of your tin of polish, cover it with a bit of tape, and make sure your tins are properly closed when storing in you shoe cleaning cady.

 

Just as I thought to post about my love of clean shoes and shoe cleaning, I decided to search to see if anyone else has mentioned this problem.  Hah!  Others have too,,,and I came across this. 

Cleaning shoes is just the thing for a rainy day!

After several unanswered e-mails, a registered letter and a hastily placed long-distance call to Douglassville directory assistance, I found that Sara Lee Corporation had purchased Kiwi Brands. Lorraine answered their customer assistance hotline.

It turned out that we had the solution entirely backwards. The holes were placed in the lids to let an “oily goo” evaporate! Several batches of the black shoe wax were apparently mixed incorrectly and an oily substance (Lorraine’s words) was rising to the surface of the polish. Once Kiwi headquarters was made aware of the problem they were faced with throwing out all of their stock from these batches, which would cost a lot of money, or else fixing the problem as cheaply as possible. They opted for the latter. Temporary workers were set to the task of punching a small hole in the lid of each tin in the affected batches. . These tins were left sitting in storage and the holes were covered prior to shipping.