What: Damaged 1940s dress. (A Doris Dodson Original!)
Origin: Long ago thrifting extravaganza.
How long kept: My college friend S/PDX comes to mind. It has been a mighty long time since we would have last thrifted together. Late 80s?
Usage: See Confession.
Why kept: Mostly, Storage Boxes are Evil, and Out of Sight, Out of Mind (the reason that Storage Boxes Are Evil).
Destination: Down the trash chute...sopping wet.
Confession: Earlier, I got rid of an oddly stinky clothing item, blaming the musty smell on vintage dry-cleaning fluid or cigarette smoke.
The smell seemed to stick to a few things in the Evil Storage Box, but to readily wash out of the washable items, and to air out of others.
This was one of the things I had saved. Frankly, I had forgotten that I had held onto it, until I found it in my closet today. I thought it has been aired out, but it still stank.
Confession, part deux: How do I describe the scent? It was kind of like lighter fluid gone bad.
And I mean gone bad like lighter fluid you might find, slightly congealing, in a bucket. In a dark corner of Stephen King's basement.
Confession, continued: I had never really inspected this dress all that closely. It was a sundress, with straps that buttoned to the bodice. The zipper was broken beyond repair; the dress had been mended and taken in, both sloppily. There were splotty rust stains on the bodice.
Inspired by Marisa, I figured I could make a cute pillow with the unstained fabric, harvesting the lace for another purpose, and set about washing the dress by hand.
One of the straps had a stain I had never noticed. It made me question whether the "rust stains" actually happened when the last owner of the dress had been badly injured in a knife fight.
Son of confession: Laundry is my favorite home art. And I'm known for my stain removal prowess. I put this in a washtub and washed a ton of dry cleaning fluid out of the dress.
I soaked it with an enzyme tablet.
I washed it again and rinsed it copiously.
It smelled so terrible -- far worse when wet -- that I decided I couldn't even wash it with my laundry. (Those enzyme tablets not only work on almost anything that isn't supernatural, but they leave a very strong scent of "American Laundry Detergent" behind. No such luck.)
It would have to go to textile recycling on Monday. I hung it up to dry, started a load of laundry, and went to the grocery store.
When I came home, about 40 minutes later, I walked into my apartment and was hit by the lighter fluid smell.
Confession, part V: Green cred be damned. In a New York second, this thing was in a (recycled) plastic bag and down the trash chute.
30 minutes later, I have sprayed the tub the dress was hanging over with essential oils in water. And boiled some water with cinnamon and almond extract added. I still can't tell whether the scent is gone or not.
Like a ghost.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
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Darn, I wish you had saved the label! I am collecting vintage clothing labels for a project. Doris Dodson sounds like a classic!
ReplyDelete"S," I would have snipped it off in a second, if only to photograph it...except for that odor. I'm not sure that there was a chance in heck that it wouldn't have been irrevocably stinky.
ReplyDeleteI'm dated the dress to the 40s based on fabric colors and style. I think it was a rayon of some sort, and I'm wondering whether the chemicals to create the rayon (possibly different due to wartime) somehow reacted with the dry cleaning chemicals to create some seriously awful mojo.
I've bought and cleaned a lot of vintage fabric over the years, and have never had an experience like this. If this were an episode of the X-Files, we'd be on a path to something slimy rising up out of the landfill. Wearing a strappy yellow sundress.
I will definitely remember to save labels for you in the future. (If they don't seem too supernatural.) Here's what I found on Doris Dodson...the label on the dress was different:
http://www.vintagefashionguild.org/content/view/942/121/
Oh, my...those labels are lovely, seriously. But I'll trust that your smell-o-meter was not malfunctioning and that even in the time it would take to scan, you've saved me from a grisly demise. And a bad book: "A Scent-less Death by Doris Dodson."
ReplyDeleteIt was even the way that the dress wasn't drip drying...after 40 minutes of stinky hanging, it was still sodden. At that point, I didn't even want to touch the dress again to find the tag.
ReplyDeleteRayon becomes fabric by a process where plant material (I think usually flax) is subjected to treatment, which I believe is both mechanical and chemical.
Back in my heavy thrifting days, I used to take stuff I bought to a place that offered dry cleaning by the pound. Today, I try not to dry clean much of anything, but my thought about dry cleaning by the pound is, eew.
I was having thoughts like, I wonder if the chemical soup made when this was dry cleaned altered the DNA of the cellulose. It was a real "Soylent Green is People" Moment.
Sigh.