How to Starch a Dress

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. So, like a shirt that is half poly, half cotton, you can't use starch. You need to use sizing. It does almost the same thing. You don't get as stiff of an appearance from sizing, but it definitely does give the garment some body. And you could also use this on one hundred percent cotton, if you like. Again, it isn't going to give you the same effect, but you can use it. It isn't going to hurt one hundred percent cotton fabric. Starch; different kinds of starch; different ways of using starch. Some people put starch in the washing machine. I don't have that kind of starch here with me, but you can do that. You would put it in the final cycle. Some people use corn starch right from their kitchen. It's a lot of work to do that. And if you put too much in, your laundry can get gummy. So, what most people do is they use the liquid starch. This is actually my favorite way of starching. There's a little recipe on the back of the bottle that tells you the ratio of starch in the bottle to water. So, if you wanted napkins (or whatever you are using it for) to be really stiff or medium or less, it does give you that formula. This is another kind of starch; it's in powdered form. It's pretty hard to find this. Most people don't use this, though some people do swear by it because it is more economical. You will go through a bottle of this pretty quickly. This is going to last a really, really long time. But you do have to be really careful when you mix it up that you don't get any lumps; it's kind of like making gravy. Okay, so we have the spray starches. This is what I use when I'm in a hurry. We've got three brands. They all do the same thing. These are all heavy starch. There also is light starch. I never use it. I like garments to have a really nice starched feel. If I'm going to go to the trouble of starching something, I want it to look starched. This, I think is pretty cool. It's the same starch as this, except this does not have an aerosol. This has a spray bottle. One of the most frustrating things about using starch is that the aerosol cans can get clogged; the nozzles. And no matter how hard you try, you can't unclog that nozzle and you wind up tossing the can in the trash can. So, that's a little frustrating. "