How to Iron Dress Shirt Front Sleeves

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Donna Beth Joy Shapiro on behalf of ExpertVillage.com and today I'm going to show you how to iron a shirt. In this clip, we are going to talk about how to iron the sleeves on a man's cotton dress shirt. You want to first iron the plackets here. Spray a little starch and iron it from the wrong side, like that; same with the other side. The placket that has the button on it is usually a little more wrinkled and a little harder to iron. You may never get it completely flat. And again, you want to make sure that you don't iron completely over the buttons. You don't want to scratch the sole plate of your iron and you don't want to melt the buttons. You could also iron the outside of that, if you can get it. Sometimes the placket isn't very long and it is impossible to get an iron to it. This one's got a fairly long placket. And you want to fold your sleeve so that the seem is down here. You want to make sure that you are at the seam and that is the very bottom. It's going to take you a little bit of effort here to arrange this so that you've got it completely flat. Some shirts are really difficult to get flat. You've also got this problem here that you've got this whole shirt is laying on the ironing board. It does take a little bit of arranging to get it so that you've got your fabric flat. we are going to start up here first because this end of the sleeve can be a little bit problematic. Okay, so you've got that nice and flat so you spray your starch. You can just go ahead and spray the whole sleeve. Give it a few seconds and there you go. I find ironing this part of the shirt particularly satisfying. I don't know why, I just do. Okay, so then we've got this end of the shirt. And you are never going to get it completely flat because of the tucks here. So just do the best that you can. Get the nose of your iron in there, like that. You don't want to iron over the placket because you are going to get the outline. You can; I try to avoid it. I'll show you what happens when you do iron over it so that you can see what I'm talking about. So you are going to get that, which I don't find particularly attractive. I mean, I don't like the wrinkles in it if I don't iron over it, but I find this less attractive. And then you flip it over. "