I'm no cleaning expert, but I do feel this information may be of use to someone.
Check your backpack's material composition. What's the tag say? Is it polyester? I can only really vouch for polyester, but if it isn't cotton or leather you should be fine here.
Recently, an unfortunate situation occured involving my backpack and a can of Cherry Coke. As such, I needed to clean my bag, because I didn't quite fancy carrying around a sticky mess for a bit over a semester. I asked a friend who's just as clumsy as I am, and she said that I could just throw it into the washing machine on "low" mode, and air dry it. Now, my washing machine doesn't have a "low" mode, and I must be Malenia, Goddess of Rot with the way how all my stuff left to air dry tends to mold or get peed on by my dogs, so I wasn't too keen on that.
As a result, here is my revised tactics, which work!
- Put your bag in the washer alone
- Add a little bit of non-cleaning liquid detergent (optional, I think), but don't add bleach or anything like that.
- Wash on whatever you have that's vaguely close to "low"- I used delicates.
- Take out and put into the dryer on normal settings, or on a low heat setting if you prefer that.
Yes, that's it. It certainly did save my week.
Happy Thanksgiving to you, dear reader, and may your future never involve Coca-Cola on fabric in an unintentional way.