Caring for and Ironing your Custom Dress Shirts

[bkarmstrong]

4 tips on how to care for your dress shirts:

Tip 1 - Never take your custom dress shirts to the Cleaners.

Tip 2 - Hate the unsightly brown collar stain you get on your shirts after wearing them a couple times? Kill those shirt collar stains with a stain remover as soon as you can.

Tip 3 - Learn how to iron correctly.

Tip 4 - Don't let your collars shrink.

More details in my blog entry below:

Caring For Your Custom Dress Shirts
OR
http://bkarmstrong.blogspot.com/2011...ss-shirts.html

 

[CYstyle]

Starch is not good for shirts. I never use starch.

Use a good iron to iron your shirts, and an ironing board with a vacuum does wonders. Always use distilled water for the iron. Impurities in tap water will build up in the boiler and become inefficient, and it can cause stains on shirts.

 

[Nicola]

Originally Posted by bkarmstrong

Tip 2 - Hate the unsightly brown collar stain you get on your shirts after wearing them a couple times?

Yuck. Do you turn your underwear inside out to?

 

[stubloom]

The notion that you should never take a custom shirt to a dry cleaner/shirt laundry just because the overwhelming majority of cleaners are poor strikes me as extreme. Is the answer to the problem to avoid shirt laundries all together, or is the answer to find a shirt laundry that "does it right"? As with any service you procure, the quality of work will range from poor to extraordinary. The key, to my way of thinking, is to find a shirt laundry (a) that knows what they're doing and, (b) where the vast majority of the shirts that they handle are custom. They are few and far between, but they DO exist. That having been said, I do agree with the belief that ordinary cleaners have no clue how to care for fine shirts -- custom or OTR. Blog post: 10 reasons why cleaners can't produce laundered shirts with extraordinarily clean collars and cuffs http://ravefabricare.com/true-quali...-extraordinarily-clean-collars-and-cuffs.aspx

 

[Achilles_]

Originally Posted by CYstyle

Starch is not good for shirts. I never use starch.

Use a good iron to iron your shirts, and an ironing board with a vacuum does wonders. Always use distilled water for the iron. Impurities in tap water will build up in the boiler and become inefficient, and it can cause stains on shirts.

Interesting I did not know that the water you used in your iron was important!

 

[Mudhiker]

Originally Posted by Achilles_

Interesting I did not know that the water you used in your iron was important!

Very very important if you live somewhere where there are any dissolved minerals. Even if it is minor, over time the evaporative effect inside the iron will create a sort of "salt lake" in there, and it will clog up. At best you lose an iron. At worst you get nasty stains on your clothing. I always have a gallon of distilled water in the corner of the laundry room just for this purpose.

 

[acridsheep]

Originally Posted by Mudhiker

Very very important if you live somewhere where there are any dissolved minerals. Even if it is minor, over time the evaporative effect inside the iron will create a sort of "salt lake" in there, and it will clog up. At best you lose an iron. At worst you get nasty stains on your clothing. I always have a gallon of distilled water in the corner of the laundry room just for this purpose.

Any way to reverse any of the effects with the iron?

 

[Mudhiker]

Originally Posted by acridsheep

Any way to reverse any of the effects with the iron?

Never done it myself, but here's an article:

How to decalcify irons and steamers.

 

[acridsheep]

Originally Posted by Mudhiker

Never done it myself, but here's an article:

How to decalcify irons and steamers.

Thanks Mud!

 

[Achilles_]

Originally Posted by acridsheep

Thanks Mud!

x2