In Season

Subtitle this post "Perils of Thrifting 2" (see "Perils of Thrifting")

One day it's tweed, the next it's cotton madras, the bleeding kind, from India:


I picked this one up a few days ago. It was a good fit, but the white was looking a little bit yellow and dingy. But's it's cotton and not too structured, so I had a good feeling that a run through the machine with a bit of Oxy-Clean might brighten it up. I was right, but getting it wet brought out the stench of 10,000 cheap cigars smoked over 40 summers on Cape Cod. Now I like a good stogie on an occasional basis as much as any guy but damn, did this thing stink!

nicotine

So I washed it again, but the offending smell was just unstoppable. So I did some home work and gave it another try. Wouldn't you know, our two old friends in the kitchen cabinet, baking soda:

sodium bicarbonate

and plain old distilled white vinegar:

acetic acid

make quite a handy pair when removing an old stench. I filled the kitchen sink with hot water, poured in a hefty helping of vinegar and a ton of baking soda, stirred with a wooden spoon to disolve the soda, then soaked the jacket in it for 3 1/2 hours. As for bleeding madras, the water turned the color of purple Kool-Aid, and the jacket gained this fantastic faded, almost denim-like quality. I hung it too dry overnight in the shower, then left it hanging outrsdie for 4 hours the next day. Things fresh as a diasy now.

You might think that's an awful lot of pain-in-the-a** trouble to go to for a crummy thrift store jacket, and you'd be right. But this kind of fading, bleeding old fashioned madras is getting hard to come by in the days of colorfast dyes and non-iron shirts, never mind in a three button sack cut. And when you do manage to find one new, they tend to cost a lot more than $7.49.