faithcreates

All the suggestions are great, but one thing most people forget about using is borax. It's really good at taking out bad odors from fabrics. You can either soak your blocks in it or you can run a cycle thru your washer using just borax first, then a second time around using your laundry soap and borax together.

Faith

NanaCsews2

Several years ago, a friend of mine had a beautiful cashmere sweater. Another friend borrowed it 'out' one evening and came back with nasty cigarette smoke embedded into the sweater. She had no clue how to clean the smell out, so I suggested white vinegar. As she didn't want her sweater in the washer, I took my large stainless steel pot that has a pasta colander and placed the sweater in the bottom of the pot. I put the colander in the pot over the sweater, set a glass bowl of vinegar in the colander, and put the lid on the pot. We left the sweater in there for less than a day. The vinegar soaked up the smells and did not leave a vinegary smell in the sweater. We couldn't even tell our friend had worn it to the bars. And the vinegar had no effect on the stainless steel.

RainydayQuilter

I apologize to everyone for my rude behavior - starting a new thread and then disappearing for days. Thanks for everyone's advice, I knew someone here would be able to help me. I'm pretty sure that they were made with just common everyday yarn and not wool (I clipped off a hanging tail and did the burn test.)

I'm going to hedge my bets and do bits and pieces of almost everyone's advice. I stopped at the store after work and bought both safeguard and dial gold, I'm going to start with putting the squares in a copy paper box with a couple bars of soap (both brands) and then leave closed for a couple of days. And then will see what kind of smell I have. I'm leaning toward washing them before I try to work with them. If they still smell i'll try the vinegar soak. Finally, I'll probably wash them. I have 2 of the mesh laundry bags, i'll pick up a couple more to use (thanks for the idea, I had not thought of using them for this). I'll probably wash them with with borax or the vinegar soak, stopping the agitator as someone suggested. With that I'm off to start the first step in my great "get rid of the smoke smell" experiment.

lwbuchholz

I have asthma too and I can tell you that febreeze has the worst odor and sets me off something awful. It makes it very hard because people think it really does take odors out and it really adds a cover up odor that is awful.
The thrift stores use febreeze a lot and it is hard to shop in those that do that. I have put things full of cigarette smoke outside for as long as I could and that helps and may be worth a try. The other ideas sound good too. I may try the viniger trick to take the febreeze odor out of things.
Lynda

IrishgalfromNJ

What a haul. I made a granny square afghan with 80 - 8" squares and it's huge so 144 - 7" squares is a lot of granny squares. I hope you have fun putting them together once you get them aired out.