Ironing - For or Against?

i can't! the closest cleaners is about 9 blocks away and i don't have a car!

had no idea this was such a hated chore.

no wonder my wife sat with a grin from ear to ear as i sorted out the pile every week.

f*ck, should have cashed in those brownie points better.

rayon shirts can git tae fuck . and microfibre and all those bullshit polyesters.

ZS, have you tried taking the shirts out of the dryer when they're still partly damp? Depending on the fabric, the dampness might help ironing, and the iron will do the rest of the drying for you. If they're super-dry they can be impossible to iron no matter what you do.

i guess the alternatives are
1)asking a friend to borrow a car twice (once to bring them there, once to bring them back)
2)walking a really long way with a bunch of hangers (maybe i should just do this, but god dammit)
3)riding a bike with a bunch of hangers, circus style (might die)

Steamers won't put creases in where you want them, like the "ridgeline" crease down the arms of shirts. For getting wrinkles OUT, though, everyone seems to love them!

As someone whose laundromat has been about 8 blocks away since I moved in June, I do feel your pain. I iron at home if necessary, though.

That's cruel, ZS. Just cruel.

Well, I have this thing:

http://www.sewforless.com/products/31189.jpg

Rowenta IS8050 Commercial Grade Clothes Steamer

I think it cost about $50 on Craigslist. I went for a pro model because the consumer models are prone to breaking/not working. I've had it for at least five years now. It just stays up in a corner and I give things a steam. I do steam my own dress shirts and it works fine, although it's not going to give you that crisp result that you'd get with an iron.

ZS, have you tried taking the shirts out of the dryer when they're still partly damp?

i have, but if i do that then everything in the dryer comes out super-wrinkly. and that adds to the overall workload, since then i would have to iron even the items that would normally be at an acceptable level of low-wrinklage if they were dried for a bit longer.

why is life so haaaaard? timely thread revive, since i'm doing the ironing doing the laundry tonight and i've been dreading it all day

Is the dry cleaners on a bus line? The trick (that I learned from Jeff), is to have ten shirts that you rotate in and out of the cleaners. Then you're only going once/week to get them/drop them off.

Actually, I guess you'd need 11 shirts so you have one that you're wearing when you pick up/drop off. I think. Math's hard let's go to the mall.

I do steam my own dress shirts and it works fine, although it's not going to give you that crisp result that you'd get with an iron.

oh, i'm not looking for perfection! i'm looking for the bare minimum level of crispness necessary!

There's no crispness whatsoever (like Laurel said, you can't put a crease in a shirt with a steamer), but there are no wrinkles, and that's what matters to me.

yeah, it's the removal of wrinkles that's important to me, too. crispness is a bonus but more like a welcome accidental result than a goal.

Hang your shirts up wet, ZS. Pull all the seams straight and flatten the button plackets with your fingers. Button the top button. Leave overnight. The weight of the water in the fabric helps to pull the wrinkles out. They won't be crisp and perfect, but they are usually acceptable.

i'm skeptical that it would actually work! seriously, the worst ones usually come out looking like this:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AXy8FremNdU/TZ5ezrc638I/AAAAAAAAABo/0Rar7U6hTlE/s1600/wrinkled+shirt.jpg

Do you take your stuff out of the dryer right away?

@ mad god : 'challenge accepted'

5 minutes, and i'd have that in a far better condition.

I've just always lived close to the dry cleaners. And my shirt rotation needs to be a little larger. I think I'm at 12 now. Really should be at least 14 to 16.

ZS, this is how we have done our shirts for the past 3 years. Wash them on Permanent Press, which uses a cooldown rinse and a slower spin. It leaves a bit more water in the fabric. Put the shirt on a hanger (plastic is best), smooth it out, tug the collar into shape, straighten the seams and the plackets, gently flatten the bottom hem if it is rolled. Then just hang it up to air dry. I have a rack of stuff hanging in the basement from the weekend's laundry; will take a picture when I get home from work of the results.

I wear dress shirts constantly and after figuring out that I was spending close to $60 a month at the dry cleaners, I bought a very nice high-end Rowenta iron and a good board. Ironing now has become a perfect pseudo-zen activity and I can get everything done within an episode and a half of Maron's WTF.

I am a terrible at ironing. I'm a perfectionist, which means that ironing pants takes a half hour or more. Dry cleaning when I have the money, which isn't often. Used to get my parents to do my dry cleaning for me.

I choose to never iron; anything wrinkly I just spray down with a serious mist of 50/50 water/vodka (to get out smells, which Mythbusters says is a SURE THING, which better be true or I am teaching eighth graders while reeking of Popov). Works ok because when I get to work I am fucking covered in sweat anyway so who fucking cares anyway oh gos I'm a slob/NB I am a slovenly slob.

i've been ironing shit for years and uh practice does not always make perfect

I just don't wear clothes that require work like this. my wardrobe is all stretch tops and knit jumpers and stuff, fuk a dress shirt.

Yeah I used to think men had it easier in the work clothes dept. but the idea of what is a 'dress shirt' for women can be so nebulous that ultimately it can be an advantage.

Yup. Today I have on a plain black...well, its efectively a long sleeved tee. Over which Ive layered a twin-set style carigan, and teamed with a tweed hobble skirt. So Im not wearing a shred of needs-ironing material but I still look mad men-esqe. I'd hate to have to wear suits.

ZS, do you shake out your shirts BEFORE you put them in the dryer? if you put stuff all balled up, it will cause more wrinkles bc it stays balled up as it dries.

The other option is hanging clothes on the line! I get the impression no one in america rly does this?

yeah, that stuff is like relegated to 50s movies

i mostly just wear flannel shirts bc i hate this so much. I have a couple nicer shirts but i never wear them bc of all the wrinkles. there are a lot of annoying things about working in IT, but i have to say, being able to dress like a slob is a perk.

Love those vented poly travel shirts (eg Ex Officio, Royal Robbins, and some store brands) intended for travelers who have to do their wash in their hotel rooms. Never need ironing, are colorfast and seem to stay in good condition for years. Pick them up at 1/3 price occasionally on eBay.

Flannel is not an option as I live in a semitropical swamp.

For business attire, the 50/50 shirt has been unfairly maligned.

the shirt sprayed with my 50/50 water/vodka mix? agreed.

I'm not wearing a shred of material but I still look mad.

I iron 5 shirts for the week on Sunday evening, and then work my way through them - depending on perspiration levels endured, might wear one of these a second time at the weekend, because who cares by then? Bottom half is nearly always jeans or chinos so not much ironing needed there, although I'll run an iron over jeans if they come out of the wash with one of those irritating long creases down the leg.

Jaq, I'll def give your air drying method a go, and if that fails then Abbbottt's vodka system as Plan B.

For business attire, the 50/50 shirt has been unfairly maligned.

otm - I used to have a rolling stock of carhartt 50/50 s/s shirts when I did a more tech-focused job and they hardly ever needed ironing. Golden days.

This is an old informercial for Ironrite clothes irons.

I hope this company went bankrupt by the next year. This is nauseating on so many levels....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ll24iHp214

my cleaning lady does all my ironing, money well spent. is there a c/d thread about cleaning ladies?

I think there's a house cleaner thread.

Abbott - I use vodka/water spray (with added lavender, because I'm fancy) to spray clothes that I've worn once and want to wear again but that might need a little freshening in the pits area.

ZS, do you shake out your shirts BEFORE you put them in the dryer? if you put stuff all balled up, it will cause more wrinkles bc it stays balled up as it dries.

...yes...

...well, no I don't! I'm such a fool. Next time I will try this.

i've been ironing shit for years and uh practice does not always make perfect

it works better if you iron the shiRt

also maybe I'm doing it wrong but HOW THE HELL do you spend 2 hours ironing 10 shirts???? I don't think I've ever spent more than 5 minutes ironing a piece of clothing.

10 shirts in 2 hours is only 12 mins per shirt to be fair.

ZS, this won't help you know, but next time you buy shirts, look for "no iron" shirts or shirts with a little bit of polyester content.

Also, make sure you take stuff out of the dryer the instant it finishes.

That sounds miserable. Xposr

I might take 10 minutes to press an entire suit

and then there's the overhead of hanging up the suit afterwards. could easily add another minute here and there. and i note that the 12 minutes figure was measured while drunk.

extra overheads: wee breaks (which then involve washing and drying of hands), breaks for pausing to watch exciting bits of TV, twitter updates, drawsomething. I'm surprised anything can get done under 3 hours.

yah seriously. get a good iron and a big ironing board. 3 minutes per shirt, maybe 5 minutes if you're watching tv too. don't dry nice shirts fully. get them iron dry, which is like half dry. (or if you have space then air dry them you disgusting savage.) ironing is much much quicker with damp clothes, and the iron does the rest of the drying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK6iQj-I_0w

and don't take wee/twitter/drawsomething breaks

I used to scoff at my wife's predilection for air-drying everything until I realized it meant it cut my ironing down by 75%; now I scoff at her predilection for folding over wet clothes before hanging them so that it takes them 5 days to dry.

also if you really really hate ironing and these are just office shirts then get non-iron shirts. tm lewin do them 4 for 100 quid in the uk. they call it a sale but it's on all the time afaict. in the us brook brothers have a similar thing on non-iron, but their standard deal is apparently 3/$219, so wait for sales.

You guys are spending like 180 days of your life just ironing.

Always my most despised household chore, for all the usual reasons. (Couldn't get creases or collars right, and frequently burned myself.) Plus I hate that scorching-metal smell. I haven't ironed since '99 and never will again. Let the cleaners do it when necessary.

I saved a lot of money this summer by washing and ironing my own dress shirts

but it is very time consuming in the future I will bring my shirts to a cleaner

Ironing seems to be based on the topological impossibility that an asymmetrical 3d object can compress to a flat surface

beating the creases out of a plain t-shirt (which would probably not need ironing anyway) is just about OK, but once there are frills and ruching and buttons and darts and seams and... no

plus my iron hates me and likes to do things like suddenly deposit large quantities of limescaley water down the front of the coloured shirt I should have left the flat wearing five minutes ago, or trip the fuses for half the flat including the freezer, etc