I knitted a pair of mitts for Laura this past spring, with some leftover Koigu. I have learned by experience not to expect careful treatment of handknits from the girls, even if they are as delighted with them as Laura has been with the mitts, but when Julia came to me the other evening with a mitt in her hand and said, "Mom, what's this?" I tell you my hair stood on end.
I couldn't think what it was, a solid, flexible plastic-like mass some inches in diameter, with curiously cratery edges a little harder than the rest. "Oh," Laura said, suspiciously nonchalant, "that's putty," some gacky stuff from a Mad Science workshop she went to late in the summer. Apparently she and a friend had been playing in the girls' room and were, I regret to say, throwing the putty at each other, and when it disappeared, they simply shrugged and went on to something else. I could not seem to pin her down as to how long it had been missing, but it was at least a week.
And so, well, Mommy got a little science lesson of her own. The first step, of course, was to research removing putty from wool, both in my indispensable Home Comforts reference and online. Helpfully, the (now-empty) putty container listed the ingredients -- sodium borate solution, polyvinyl acetate, and diluted paint -- which David tells me is much the same ingredients as white glue. Most of the sources I found recommended Simple Green cleaner or isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol, but warned that stains were almost certainly likely, from the dye in the putty.
I didn't think to take photos until I was well into it. This first is after a soak in plain water. The putty had, curiously, lost most of its color in the water, and gotten rather revoltingly glutinous. It felt slimy, but was still quite firmly attached. I managed to pick off some of it at the top left, but instead of coming off in rubbery strings (or, I should be so lucky, in one big mass), it was only tiny anticlimactic bits.
The next thing I tried was Simple Green. The wool felt stiff and squeaky in it. ("Koigu!" I thought mournfully.)
I scrubbed the putty with an old toothbrush, and picked at it a bit,and it did have some effect but not much. It might be that I was not patient enough to let it soak longer in the Simple Green, though. The putty seemed to come off better down in the purl ribs, possibly because it had either not adhered as thoroughly there or because it didn't have enough surface area to cling to, with the shape of the stitches.
The last resort was isopropyl alcohol. I was concerned that it would bleach the wool, but by this point I figured that I didn't really have anything to lose.
The next picture is after a few short soaks and rinses.
Yuck. After this, I thought, "oh well", and just left it in the sink in about a half-inch of alcohol, and went to bed. Perhaps half an hour later, David looked at it, and the putty had dissolved completely, and so he rinsed the mitt and left it to dry on the edge of the sink. The mitt was, from all of the picking at it and scrubbing with the toothbrush, I guess, nearly an inch longer than it had been, but I tossed them both in the delicate wash cycle as usual, and it went back to its original shape.
The color, alas, will never be the same. You can still see the shadow of the putty -- which was purple -- and the effects of the rubbing alcohol, although luckily the stain is not quite so obvious in real life as in the photograph. The texture of the wool is a little different, with not so much body as before, as though it had been through a number of rough washings. I am resigning myself to a soak in alcohol for the other mitt, to make the colors more like between the two.
Oh, well.
(Still very comfy and warm, though, I must say. Hurrah, Koigu!)
