At the end of Poppy’s ballet class, the teacher rewards the girls with a sticker. Poppy usually applies it straight to her front, where it stays until laundry time.

Except for when it stays there all the way through laundry time.

I don’t know if you’ve ever washed a leotard with a sticker stuck to it. But if you haven’t? I’d suggest avoiding it. The sticker dissolves, I guess, leaving behind a sticky, gooey mess. It didn’t get on anything else, in our case, but it did make a great and terrible mess of Poppy’s leotard. There were little goo bits all over it. I tried to rub them away with a paper towel and some water. That made a bigger mess. Then I thought maybe washing it in hot water might sort of melt the glue away. No dice. So I did what I normally do in a pinch: I turned to the internet.

I found a lot of product suggestions, but I didn’t want to buy anything if it wasn’t absolutely necessarily. A few people suggested rubbing alcohol, which I don’t seem to have, and vegetable oil, which required its own post-treatment treatments to remove. And then I found one final, silly-sounding idea: Peanut butter.

So I slathered the peanut butter all over the sticker residue, tossed the leotard back in the washing machine and hoped for the best. And guess what? It worked. There were a few little glue balls left on the leotard after the peanut butter wash, but the majority of the mess was gone.

Now my ballerina might smell a little bit like peanut butter, but at least she isn’t covered with tiny dots of glue.