Incidently Learning

Earlier this month I thrifted a comfortable red sweater for the holidays.

Before the first wearing I gave it a rinse and spin in the washer, but after several uses it was ready for a good wash. There were no written laundry instructions anywhere, just a handful of symbols that I needed to decode. It was time to go on an Internet hunt.

The Tide website told me that I could machine wash the sweater in warm water with no bleach and iron on a high temperature, but it did not tell me what the last symbol meant. On the Wunderlabel site, it added that the 30-degee Celsius water temperature could be interpreted as cold water (between 65-85 degrees), agreed about no bleach and the ironing temperatures, and said that the circled P meant it could be dry cleaned with any solvent except trichloroethylene. The Clorox site agreed. However, none of the sites talked about how to dry the item.

I kept looking, but never found the information. However, I did learn something cool.

I knew about the little 'Info' button (an 'i' in a circle) at the bottom of  my phone's Photo app. It gives the photo metadata, but somewhere along the line it also turned into a Visual Look Up feature. In this case, looking up the symbol information pulled up Siri AI. Sadly, not even Sire supplied the information I was looking for, so I will end up laying the sweater flat to dry.

I only paid four dollars for the sweater, so I will be sad if the washing information is incorrect but not crushed.

Five years ago: Almost Like The Real Thing