Three and a half hours. . .

. . . many gallons of water, two bottles of windex, and 4or 5 rolls of paper towel later. . .

A CAUTIONARY TALE

So this morning I reached for a new, fresh bottle of Liquitex acrylic ink and, OH! NO!--the lid came off in my hand, the bottle fell from the drawing board and onto the carpet.

How could I allow such a dumb thing to happen, you ask? 

Laziness. 

I wanted to test the new color against the greens I already had.  What I SHOULD have done is put a dropper-ful into a dappen dish, dip the pen, make a couple of lines, then suck the rest of the ink back up in the dropper and clean the pen and dappen dish.  Instead, thinking to avoid cleaning the dappen dish (I mean really--how hard is it to clean a dappen dish??) I held the nib over the bottle and touched the end of the dropper to the nib, put the lid on top of the bottle, made my marks, cleaned my pen and promptly forgot about screwing the lid down tight.

Sigh. . .accidents happen.  I can usually just roll with a true accident but this?  I was SO MAD at myself.

Here's what's left of the stain:

Now I've got a least an hour's worth of work to put my studio back together (everything had to be taken off the top of the desk and the lighted drawing board disassembled because ink got all over it and underneath the glass).

The good news?  None of my work was touched.  Not a drip or a drop.

So, who else has spilled copious amounts of ink onto carpet?  How did you get the stain out?  (Or DID you ever get the stain out?)