You have a closet full of beautiful ballroom dresses and you want to keep them looking that way. So, how do you plan to keep them as lovely as the day you bought them? Whenever you wear any ballroom dancing dress, it will surely require extra special effort to remove any odors and restore it to its former pristine condition.
Firstly, your ballroom dresses must be hung in a dry location with a good amount of space around them to protect against creasing. Ideally they should each have a protective plastic cover. A dark-colored cover is far better than a translucent one as this will help put a stop to the material fading from exposure to the light. Just to be sure, keep them away from strong natural light too. Leaving the cover’s zip open enables the dress to keep aired, helping to make sure that the dress does not grow to be damp and mildew to develop.
Moving on from how to store our ballroom dance dresses, let’s now take a look at the best way to care for them in terms of keeping them clean and well-presented. The care instructions supplied by the manufacturer or your dress-maker are an excellent place to start.
The chances are that if it’s practice dancewear with no embellishments or trimmings, then it might be machine-washable and almost certainly hand-washable. In either event, wash in cold water with a mild detergent. All colored clothes should be washed in a diifferent load from whites and lighter-colored ones, otherwise the color can run and spoil them. For competition dancing clothes, again if they are not finished with decorations such as stones and beads, you can try hand or a very cool machine wash – no more than 30 degrees Centigrade – to avoid shrinkage. Generally-speaking, it’s all right to machine-wash fabrics such as georgette and Lycra, commonly used in ballroom dance dresses.
If there is heavy staining, then look at utilizing a pre-wash mark remover treatment too. You have to be particularly careful if the dress has dark-colored satin bias binding as this can mark the fabric. So you have to be meticulous in ensuring that the binding and the textile do not come into contact with each other while still damp. This may well sound like overkill, but you will be glad you did it.
Now if your ballroom dresses are decorated, then you should never launder or even dry clean them. The danger is that any stones will be ruined and lose their sparkle. What’s more, it’s even possible for the glue to dissolve. You can, of course, spot clean with a brush.
So what do you do if you cannot wash your ballroom dresses, but you want to freshen them up and perhaps eliminate the wrinkles? It might be possible to hand-wash a body suit in its own. In this case, you must do it with the dress inside out and be particularly mindful to use cold water and mild soap only. Always rinse in cold water and allow to drip dry. If you cannot wash the any part of the gown, then you could try out hanging it in a steamy place, for instance from the shower rail.
Whenever you wash any part of a ballroom dress, it is best not to wring it out and to allow it to drip dry over your bath. If it is really heavy, it might be a good idea to support its weight over a clothes horse, otherwise the fabric could permanently stretch. Always allow plenty of time to dry as some trimmings can take days.
Finally, you should be very wary of ironing any part of your ballroom dress. Stretch fabrics should not be ironed at all. Otherwise, use a very cool temperature, especially with synthetic fabrics which can easily burn.
Hopefully, you have found this advice helpful. With a little thought about storage, cleaning and ironing your ballroom dresses , you will find that they keep their initial beauty much longer and no matter how much you invested in them, it will have been money well spent.