How to Iron a Complex 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. I've had this about thirty years and when it needs to be laundered or cleaned, I send it to the dry cleaner. But, I've got my iron set for synthetics. I'm not going to starch this, of course. I'm not going to spray it. I'm going to iron it dry. I would be afraid that any moisture would leave spots even on a print so wild and crazy. I would only use water on it, or a spray, as a last resort. I would definitely not use the steam function on the iron. Ironing a dress is pretty similar to ironing a man's shirt. You start at the collar. If there's a yoke, you do that. You do the sleeves after that. You do the back of the top of the dress and then the fronts. Then you would do the bottom. Here you've got this paplon, you could (that's a piece of fabric that's attached to the waist line). It's a little hard to iron because, you can see, it's seemed in here on the sides. You could try to fit as much of that on the ironing board as possible. If not, the way I would probably handle this, and the way I think will work out the best, is just iron that along with the bottom of the dress. Again, our iron is set on the lowest possible setting. You can do a lot of damage to rayon if your iron is too hot. If your iron is too hot, you are going to make the fabric too shiny. The shininess comes from when you are literally melting the fabric and there is no way to repair that. I've learned my lesson well. I've ruined quite a number of rayon garments including things that were dark in color. For some reason, blues and blacks will get shiny very, very quickly. So I will just proceed as if I'm ironing a man's dress shirt; back of the collar first and then the front of the collar. I have a few wrinkles here that aren't really coming out, and probably I should move the setting up on the iron, but I'm not going to. I do not want to take the chance of ruining this fabric. This fabric is now seventy, eighty years old and I hope to be able to wear this dress when I'm seventy to eighty years old. So I'm going to take as good of care of it as possible. Thanks for watching. "