Know Your Fabric Before Cleaning

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When shopping around for dry cleaning quotes, take the type of fabric into consideration. It may be a fabric needing special care, such as a silk. You need to check the dress for any labelling that would assist you in identifying the fabric/fibre involved. Also, if the dress is heavily trimmed with something needing delicate handling - vintage lace, beading or embroidery, for instance - that could account for a 'higher than usual' dry cleaning quote as it will be a time consuming process to go over a complete dress inch by inch to achieve an even clean. If it is an older dress, spot cleaning, while it may not damage the fabric, could leave a 'clean spot'. Before attempting to clean it yourself, you need to know what fabric you are cleaning. If there is no label identifying the material, but there is part of the dress where you could remove some fabric for testing, that would be best. You could then test the fabric referring to something like (www.ditzyprints.com/dpburnchart.html). Once you know what sort of fabric you have you can refer to any of the myriad sources of information for care of that fabric type, such as (www.ahrm.vt.edu/ct/fabric.htm). Whichever method you choose, the best bet is to proceed with caution!