Equipment You Need to Iron a Dress

Series Summary

Ironing dresses without damaging them is not the easiest thing to do, especially considering some of the delicate fabrics they are made from. Sometimes dresses should be steamed or even taken to dry cleaners instead of ironed, and it is important to know how to treat your dresses. If you would like to learn how to iron your dresses without damaging them or would like to learn more ironing techniques, you can learn for free from one of our experts.

In this free how to video series, learn how to iron dresses from expert Donna Shapiro. Donna will show you how to iron a dress with blended fabric; how to steam a wool shirt; how to steam a corduroy dress; how to iron a linen dress; how to iron a rayon dress; how to know when to iron, dry clean, or steam your clothing; and how to iron difficult-to-iron-dresses.

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 dress. This gives you a nice burst of steam. It gives you the spray. You could use a less expensive iron. It does exactly the same thing. It may not get as hot as this particular iron, but with the right starch or spray water, you'll be able to get all of the wrinkles out of your shirt. If you have a synthetic shirt, and you want to give it a certain amount of shine, you could use sizing. Sizing is used only on synthetic fabrics. For cotton shirts or linen shirts, starch gives a heavy garment a lot of body. I like heavy starch. Some people prefer the lighter starch. If you don't want to use either of those, but have very stubborn wrinkles, you could just spray it with water. You also need an ironing board. This is a standard size ironing board. Ironing boards do come wider now. The bigger the board, the better. The covers are a little hard to find for the bigger boards. So, if all you have is a table top, you want to make sure that you put the board at the corner of the table, so that the garment can hang free over the side of the table. If you have this in the middle of the table, you will not be able to get the wrinkles out of your shirt because you are going to keep wrinkling it every time you move it."