Steam distorts the fabric?
#22
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Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: Florida
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#25
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Join Date: May 2011
Location: Pacific NW
Posts: 9,585
I know lots of people are talking about ironing vs pressing and the distortion that can happen, but I've had shrinkage happen with steam. I learned my lesson the hard way when binding and attaching a hanging sleeve on a customer quilt. The customer had given me a very small piece of fabric to use for the sleeve. I cut it, then pressed it with steam. And it shrunk so much I was not comfortable using it for the sleeve. So I steam-pressed the rest of the fabric and crossed my fingers that there would be enough left to cut a second sleeve. (I was lucky; there was.)
#26
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Join Date: Apr 2016
Location: Blue Ridge Mountians
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we didn't dampen cloths, we were dampening & starching shirts for our men using seven=up bottles with sprinkle heads . Especially those heavy oxford white shirts. It relaxed the hard wrinkles and allowed the starch to penetrate the cotton fibers without using a heavy amount of starch. And the shirts were much easier to iron. I loved to iron , but my mother hated it....so when perma press came out, my mother tossed out all cotton and replaced them. (I thought the perma press shirts looked thin and cheap and insisted they still needed ironing....but mom said "not in my house". To bad....I still iron/starch my hubby's shirt and when my daughter's husband was called to serve in the bishopric, she came over for "serious" ironing lessons. LOL
#27
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Location: Pacific NW
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#29
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Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: Houston, TX
Posts: 9,782
My Mom had a 7-Up bottle that she had a sprinkler stopper for and would sprinkle clothes and then put into a large bag and into the refrig (keep in mind most of us had refrigs that had no space and often the "freezer" was stuck in there and hardly separate!) and she always told me it was too keep the dampened clothes fresh and not allow mildew. Think it was also left overnight so that the dampness would spread and thus the sprinkling did not have to saturate the clothes so much.
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