Ironing is a very important process for the maintenance and treatment of your garment. Even a perfectly clean garment, without proper smoothing and trimming of pleats and edges, may seem terribly ugly and deformed.

As they know in any dry cleaning, steam is the most gentle, safest and most effective method for smoothing crushing from tissues. The powerful action of steam ironing penetrates the tissues, relaxes them and so smooth them. Unlike usual ironing, the delicate action of steam keeps the fabric longer and extends its life. Frequent use of a regular iron helps to quickly wear the fabric.

Before ironing, should know and follow the instructions for composition and types of fabrics as well as their ironing to save a great deal of your nerves while working on your clothes.

Fibers are basically 2 types: natural and chemical.

• NATURAL TEXTILE FIBERS are wool, cotton, silk, flax, hemp and others. These fibers are obtained from plant or animal origin. Most of the plant fibers have a basic ingredient in cellulose, making them suitable for whitening with bleach (for white ones) and for those with persistent colors. The smoothing temperature of cotton fabrics is 100° C, for flax 70° C, for wool 110-130° C. Silk is ironed at 50-70° C. The positive qualities of natural fiber garments are that they have very good heat and moisture conductivity (i.e. the body cannot be heated), absorbing sweat, doesn’t hold static electricity, and so on.

One of the negative qualities of the garments of natural fabrics is that, over time, the fiber loses some of its strength; it is possible to shrink, felting and so on. For ironing, it is good to use steam to loosen the fabric, with always the edges of the garment being ironed at the fixed edges, because in natural fabrics, the possibility of burning is quite large.

• CHEMICAL textile fibers are mainly 2 types – artificial and synthetic.

The artificial ones are viscose silk, acetate silk, etc., and the synthetic ones are polyamide, polyacrylic and polyester. The advantages of chemical fibers are that when they are used the clothes are very little wiped out, they are harder to lose their strength in use, they are easier to clean off stains, easier to smoothen, the resistance of the colors is bigger, etc.

The disadvantages are: high degree of electrification, poor heat and moisture conduction – retain heat and do not absorb sweat from the body. Ironing of chemical fibers has a considerably lower iron temperature than those of natural materials – from 40-60° C. Here the use of steam ironing is in a considerably less volume and quantity (not necessarily), the smoothing of edges and pleats is quite possible, and it should also be borne in mind that gloss can occur when treating the garment with higher temperature or pressure on the fabric.

Do not try to remove gum or wax (bees or candle) stains with hot iron on the garment – whether you have a cloth or a safety newspaper. The probability of damaging and losing the garment in this handling is almost 100%. Leave the stain of dry cleaning – it’s one of the easiest to remove in the atelier.