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Part of the appeal of vertical blinds is they way they hang so elegantly and crisply giving a certain sophistication to the windows from which they hang. When they suffer the result of accidental spills or splashes that mark the blinds, the grubby stain becomes glaringly obvious and shouts out at you. Most vertical blind fabrics have been treated with stain repellent or stiffeners that allows you to clean off any smudges. Occasionally you may have been doing something like changing a light bulb or household chores that have transferred dust or dirt to your fingers that you might unwittingly use to subsequently adjust your blinds, perhaps pulling them apart to see of the postman is calling at your door or opening a window behind them and your mucky fingers leave a mark behind in the slat you have touched.

The first thing you should do is to investigate whether the mark can be removed by a dry method like soft brushing or vacuuming. If this is not successful the next step is to try and 'sponge' the mark with a tightly wrung out cloth, using tepid clean water with no additives, by stroking firmly along the grain of the fabric on the stained area until it has been removed. Don't be over-zealous in your 'sponging' as you may end up creating a void that shouts just as loud as the stain when you see it from a distance and all your work will have been in vain.

If you don't want to compromise the integrity of the blind fabric and the stain stubbornly remains despite your best efforts there are a couple of things you might try. You might consider swapping the stained blind slat to an end position so that any curtains hanging either side might hide the mark - only you will know it is still there. Moving slats is as easy as pie. All you have to do is release the vein from the snap holder it sits in and the beaded chain at the bottom that holds the slat in place, do the same for one of your end slats and fix them back to the overhead snap and secure the beaded chain below. Don't have curtains either side to perform this trick? Life now becomes a little more drastic but there may still be a remedy. In this case you should remove all the slats from their fixings, take the weights out of the bottom of each slat of fabric and get ready to clean them all. The reason you will have to remove all the slats is because you are going to immerse them and there may be surprisingly more dirt and dust embedded in them than you think. If you only cleaned one blind the others would look grubby by comparison. Doing them all together means they all accept the same treatment so the resulting end colour will be uniform. Swoosh them about in a bath of tepid water with a small amount of mild detergent. Work gently at any stains, rinse, shake and hang to dry either on a line or back on their snaps with the washed weights in place and a towel underneath to collect the drips of water as they dry. They should look like new but some fabrics might benefit from ironing at a suitable temperature once the fabric has dried to return them to their crisp lines.