As it's redecorating time, she believes in washing everything. Today it was the turn of some vertical blinds. I read on a suppliers website that these can be washed in a washing machine, if you are lucky. Following some reading of sites where people had done this with varying results, some disastrous, I found this link:-
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and followed the instructions. The results were excellent, even though our washing machine maker lied about not having a spin cycle on the silk program. It was necessary to run the rinse cycles twice to get a foam free rinse. YMMV!