Nothing Left To Lose

Sometimes, you do things that you thought you never would. Sometimes those are things that would have made you gasp in horror in any other situation. I'm almost ashamed to admit what I'm about to, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and ultimately, all ended quite well.

Before. Inside of the left shoe.

Remember how I said I'd fill you in on what was going on with my green Estephanie from ShoeDazzle? Well, this is it. When I got them out of the box, I found a massive spot of glue on one of them. They were otherwise perfect, and though I wasn't madly in love with the color straight out of the box, it quickly grew on me. Not only that, but I. Am. Sick. Of. Returns/Exchanges. So, I took matters into my own hands. (I figured I might as well try, since I pretty much wrote the book on cleaning this stuff already.) I decided to try and get thick, black, icky glue off of real suede. On my own, and with only what I had handy. On last Sunday, when I attempted this, that included an UGG Suede cleaning kit, a KIWI suede care kit, a butter knife, an X-acto knife, Q-Tips and a bottle of Goof Off. Yes, I was going to attempt to clean real suede with a solvent based adhesive remover.

After. It's still there, but not nearly as bad.

After hours (yes, with an "s" on the end) of dabbing on Goof Off, scraping carefully with the X-acto, and then cleaning with the UGG Suede cleaner, and smoothing over with the butter knife and suede care kit, the stain is much less noticeable. Enough so that I can now wear them and unless someone is waaaaaaaaayyy too close to my feet, they're never going to see it. Are they perfect? No. Do they have an odd chemical smell? Yes.  But, there will be no exchange or return involved and I'm feeling pretty darn good about my effort.

Although there was no additional damage to the suede by doing this type of cleaning, I don't recommend it. There are proper ways to clean suede and this isn't one of them. I think I was just lucky that it was the exact right type of suede or something. But, it's good to know that maybe suede isn't as gentle as we all feared and if you think you've ruined it, there are options you can try to clean it. So, before you toss out the next pair that you spill coffee or wine on (I've done both), maybe try a few different cleaners just to see if it works. Maybe you'll get lucky like I did.

Oh, and I went back and got the blue Estephanie, too. Which isn't really blue, but is teal green. I'll fill you in on those later.

Happy cleaning!
-A