I should not be allowed to buy nice paintbrushes. However, the employees at the craft store don’t know my reputation and they just keep selling me them. I have this nasty habit of leaving them in the cup of water between coats of paint, sometimes even between projects without washing them. I always intend to wash my brushes, but it just never seems to work out that way.
I think it’s been about 2 months since all the water in the cup of brushes sitting on my craft table evaporated, and I’ve just been avoiding dealing with it because it had some of my favorite brushes in there. I knew they may have been too far gone, and frankly, I was not ready to accept that.
So, as I was trying to think of a solution for a completely unrelated problem, I remembered the trick my parents taught me for identifying if wall paint is oil-based or not. Nail polish remover! I grabbed my jug of acetone, which is the active ingredient in nail polish remover, and splashed a little into the bottom of the cup. Enough to dunk the bristles, but not so much as to get up inside the brush because acetone is also the solvent for a lot of glues. So if it got up in the glue and then started breaking that glue down the bristles would all fall out. In this case, my brushes were all rock hard though so I was willing to take that risk.
After washing the bristles with acetone they were pliable again but still covered in little paint clumps. I washed them with regular hand soap and warm water to get the remaining paint chunks and residual acetone off. I managed to rescue 5/5 brushes, the bristles are a bit misshapen from sitting in the cup so long, so they’re not ‘good as new’ or anything, but they’re still serviceable, which is better than in my garbage can.
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