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Shrinking Dress Shirt? Unshrinking a dress shirt?

nemuritai

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Jul 21, 2008
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Hi I can understand a dress shirt shrinking after 4-5 washes.
However my Charles Tyrwhitt Sea Island Cotton shirts (2 of 'em) keep shrinking even after the 25th wash.. I may even have to stop wearing it.. I haven't changed in size the evidence is I have a 3rd shirt exactly the same in all aspects, unworn and it is about 1.5-2 inches longer on the sleeve..

I wash my shirts entirely by hand in cold water only, and I hang dry them. Despite this they seem to continue to shrink throughout their life! Is this a property of Sea Island?

I may be leaving them in cold water too long (eg., 1-2hrs per wash usually, in some extremely rare cases I become busy and leave it 8-12hrs - rare though only 3 or 4 times has this happened), could that be it?
Stretching them after washing seems like that would not work, may risk damaging the shirt, and it is alot of work.

Is it normal? Any advice?

edit:
The maker recommends ironing while wet: I wash the shirt in the evining I wore it and iron it in the morning, by morning it is 100% dry.. I iron using a steam iron at max steam setting, no pre-wetting the cotton.
 

nemuritai

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It is possible I gained some weight (muscle, hehe)
If this is the cause then it leaves the 3rd shirt unexplained.

Unless: the manufacturing standards of the company' shirts are not great and their shirts are slightly different in size even though they all report the same size.

edit:"low-end", department store shirts that I have bought have not suffered from this problem.. Actually the low-end reports a size smaller, it does not shrink, after shrinking the "high-end" shirt is smaller! (it could be the manufacturing standards since I can't remember when I bought it how bad the shrinking has become - I only compare it to the brand new 3rd one I have)
 

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