How to Iron a Linen 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. ...the size is unusual. I grabbed it, I looked at the care tag when I got home and it says "dry clean only." I wasn't going to send it to the dry cleaner. I think I know why it says "dry clean only;" it's a beautiful linen fabric that has a bit of a glaze to it (a bit of a sheen). So, before I put it through the washing machine, maybe it had a slight bit more glaze to it. So this is the type of garment that requires some sort of plan of how we are going to iron this thing out. Obviously it would have to be ironed in a couple of different sections. There's no way I could get this entire garment on the ironing board because the leg is in the way. So I would have to iron the top part of the garment, finish that and then the bottom part of the garment. You can see that you can see the facing through here. If I had it dry cleaned, that probably would not have happened. To tell you the truth, if this were the type of linen garment that was so nice and formal enough that I could wear it to an office job, I would in fact have taken it to the dry cleaner. But, because it's got slits way up the side (the slits probably come up as far as my knees) I would not wear this to an office job. So, I just went with the laundry. Again, in the summer you usually wear a linen garment. I don't usually wear a linen garment until it's over ninety degrees, with matching humidity. I'm going to keep working my way around. I've got the top half of the back. I'm going to do this half of the back and then flip it around and do the front of the garment right here. I should also say that I'm not going to...I'm going to try not to iron over this pocket. I will iron the pocket there, like that and then I will iron here. Then when I get to the bottom part of the garment, I will move the pocket up so that I'm not running the iron over the pocket. I'm going to see, again, the outline of the facings, but I don't really want to see the outline of the pocket. "