Not sure if this sort of trick has been posted before, but this is something I figured out today while cleaning Canterbury Bells seed.

Use a cotton ball to clean your smooth small seed of plant debris pretty quick. Or at least stuff like CB's where there is a lot of small smooth seed with some prickly plant debris to clean out. I was wearing gloves to shake out the seed because of the prickles, and thought about how the plant stuff kind of wanted to velcro onto the gloves.. and figured they would want to latch onto something like a cotton ball shred like mad.

I used a glass dish for a smooth surface to sort of pan the seeds to shake the plant stuff to the top.. then a bit of cotton ball and sort of drifted it over the debris on top and picked up the debris. Pan the seed again to resettle debris on top, and repeat. The cotton ball picks it up and works like a tiny towel to use to pinch it off. Half a cotton ball was plenty to clean up the pods off 1 plant, a generous pints worth of dried pods. Ended up with a scant teaspoon of very clean seed in just 3 rounds of panning out the debris.