A Weird Happening

While reading homework over the weekend, I happened to look over at our "gallery wall" in the library, which has a lot of posters and artwork. As I was looking, I saw that one of the frames seemed to be muddy or dirty. I wasn't sure how that happened, but the picture hangs below a window and my sewing box is sitting under the picture, so I thought at first that maybe somehow Llyr had run in with dirty paws and tried to look out the window, resting his paws on the frame and had gotten it dirty. I got a wet cloth to wipe off the dirt, but . . . it didn't wipe off. When I looked closer, I saw that the stuff was under the glass.

 

I showed the frame to Matt and he said he thought it looked like mold! Argh! Mold makes me feel sick just to think about. How in the world could a picture in a frame mold? But the more I looked, that's certainly what it looked like. The discoloration was made of tiny granules that were greenish-brown and yellow. I was really upset because I'd ordered this piece of artwork, a print, from etsy and there had only been a certain number available, and I loved the print. 

I had to get it clean right away. I was really worried the picture would be stained. When I turned the frame over, I saw there were even a few tiny spots on the back of the frame - did it seep through the back? Ick! I used Lysol wipes to wipe the back down. Then I started carefully disassembling the frame. 

There was mold everywhere. On the front and back of the matting, on the front and back of the print itself and a ton behind the print. To clean the back of things, I mostly wiped up the loose stuff with a paper towel and then did a heavy wiping of Lysol. I was more careful on the front of the matting where I didn't want it to stain, and overall it turned out okay when I used the paper towel to get most of the stuff off first. 

This makes me cringe. When I lifted up the picture it sort of looked like a bunch of chalk dust. Again,I  got the loose stuff then wiped multiple times with Lysol. I hope that was enough to clean it - I think I am going to clean this picture out once every couple of months for a while now with Lysol or Clorox wipes to make sure this doesn't happen again.

When it got time to clean the actual print (which looks like watercolor but thankfully is not really - it is printed onto a sort of semi-gloss paper, so that helped with cleaning), I used a small paintbrush to pick up almost all of the mold, then I went ahead and wiped it, though more gently, with the Lysol. I was worried about the picture being damaged by this but perhaps because of the way it was printed (laserjet?) the slight moisture didn't seem to do anything. There did not seem to be any discoloration left behind that I noticed. I was very thankful for that. This picture is one of my favorites in our library.

The caption for the picture would be: "There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them." One of my favorite quotes from the Harry Potter series.

You can see the picture all clean again above. See what I mean? It would have been tragic if it had been ruined. I was just so shocked though - I had never thought I'd have to worry about a picture molding. Maybe if it had originally been a real watercolor or something else this might have made more sense, but it was just printed on paper. I did, however, order this picture from another state and it came in the mail. Perhaps there was just a little tiny atom of mold or something that could mold that was on the back of the picture and it spread in the time since I'd hung it in our library (almost a year ago)? 

Have any of you readers out there had anything similar happen? Any advice to make sure none of my other special things mold? None of our other pictures, books, or anything seems to have the same problem that I can see, so I assume it was localized to that one picture. Is there some spray I could disinfect our whole library with? Matt was worried about some of our old books molding too. I can't very well clean each one of them, however. Please let me know if you've ever had anything weird like this happen!