I thought it would be a good idea to wash and iron my tablecloth before I sewed the tatting on. It wasn't. Ever since I washed it, the linen has become more and more creased. I seem to have destroyed some sort of crease protection. Can anyone tell me anything about that? What should I have done? The edging is partly sewn on, but not yet complete.
Hi, I've found this: http://www.wikihow.com/Remove-Wrinkles-from-Clothes-Without-an-Iron
ReplyDeleteMaybe you can try... Auguri!
Ale
Linen creases easily, likely there was some starch in the fabric before you washed it.
ReplyDeleteonce you have finished attaching the lace, wash it again, then lightly apply starch and iron it.
should be good as new then.
That's the hallmark of linen! - it creases. It needs to be carefully laundered - and starched. When I was a child, and living in the tropics, my mother would send all the sheets - which were linen - to the dhobi to be washed, and they always came back wrapped in brown paper parcels with string, beautifully starched. They would creak when they were unwrapped.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that a modern spray-starch would do the job properly, and it's hard to find proper starch in the supermarkets. You might have to hunt around.
Thanks very much, ladies. I did know that linen creases, but the tablecloth looked pretty smooth for sitting around for 30 years! I have some powder starch that I bought to starch snowflakes, I'll try that when I've finished sewing on the lace.
ReplyDeleteThe trick to ironing 100% linen is making sure it is damp and that your iron is on the LINEN setting (or its highest setting). If you try to iron dry linen or if the iron is not hot enough, the creases will not come out. Check out this article at Ulster Linens: .http://www.ulsterlinen.com/iron.htm
ReplyDeleteThanks. I read the article, very interesting.
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