Irish solo dance dress

To find something as special as Maggie Ramsey’s “solo dress”, you’d have to fly to Europe.

Only Irish dancers who have won first prize in certain levels of dance competition are privileged to wear one like it, we learned.  

The challenge of cleaning this three-year old red Irish dance dress, made by Elevation Design, had to do with its elaborate ornamentation.  The garment is decorated with everything from metal flakes to sequins (four different kinds), and has an under layer made of red and silver snakeskin. 

The Ramsey dress seemed to combine a number of the toughest challenges dry cleaning technicians face:

• Red dyes tend to be less stable, with red garments likely to lose vibrancy faster than other colors.
• Sequins often melt with heat, so even steam-cleaning posed risks.
• There is no one method that is safe for all the different types of fabric used in that one dress – a normal dry cleaning label from the International Association for Textile Care Labeling couldn’t begin to cover all the different parts of Maggie’s solo dress.

But, by carefully combining different tools and techniques developed over decades of specialized dry cleaning

Maggie Ramsey at the 2010 Indianapolis Feis Irish Dance Competition

experience in Indiana, including compressed air, specialized brushes, steam guns, new combinations of stain-fighting solutions and more, Classic Cleaners professionals were able to create the beautiful result pictured here.

Maggie’s mom gave us permission to share her e-mail note:

I can’t thank you enough for the excellent care you took in cleaning my daughter’s Irish Dance Solo Dress. It is beautiful!  I have sent a message to all the other Irish Dance families at our academy about our wonderful experience and great the dress turned out.  If they are thinking of purchasing a used solo dress that needs cleaning or have never had their solo dress steam cleaned, they should really contact you at the Bash location Classic Cleaners.  We were very pleased with our experience.

My daughter’s name is Maggie Ramsey and she is with the Richens/Timan Academy of Indiana located at Washington Square Mall….Thank you so much.

Cathi Ramsey

With a testimonial like that, it feels as if Classic Cleaners has won the prize!

 by Reb of the Classic Cleaners blog team

Sno Cones notwithstanding, it was h-o-t at the Summer Festival last month at 146th St. and Gray Road.

Classic Cleaners' Antique ironing board at 146th & Gray Road

Taking a break, I wandered into the Classic Cleaners store to say hello to manager Misty Elliott, and to get a longer look at the little piece of history displayed inside that Bridgewater Classic Cleaners location – an antique wooden ironing board.

Interestingly, ironing boards are a fairly new invention.  The Vikings used heated rocks as “irons”, laying the clothes out on a large, flat piece of whalebone.  But, what we think of as an ironing board was patented in 1858 by W. Vandenburg right here in the United States. The first ironing board similar to the ironing boards common in homes today was patented by Sarah Boone in 1892.

When buying an ironing board for your home, About.com advises that, if you have enough room to store it, the best kind to own is one at least 4 feet long and 12-18 inches wide.

At Classic Cleaners, of course, only the most modern ironing technology is used. The Unipress shirt machine wet-presses each shirt’s torso, sleeves, and collar simultaneously. Ironing touchups by hand follow the automated operation. Even when it comes to table linens, our large professional press allows drying and pressing to happen in a single stage. In fact, most dry cleaners simply cannot provide this kind of finish for table linens.

Ironing is more of an art than a process, though.  Even with the most advanced technology, to get good ironing, you need good people, really skillful ironing technicians who know how to press without leaving the outline of pockets on pants, who know how to finish shirt collars to perfection.  

That’s why many of our Classic Cleaners’ customers have found it most efficient to get on about their busy lives, leaving the ironing to us!

By Reb of the Classic Cleaners blog team

It’s only fitting for the “Best Dry Cleaners in Indy” to have stores and pickup/delivery routes in three of the nation’s “Best Places to Live.” With stores in Carmel, Fishers, and Noblesville, Indiana, you might say Classic Cleaners is in all the right places. 

It’s the right time, too, because:

• Money Magazine’s August issue ranks the town of Fishers #8 on its “Top Ten Best Places to Live” list, citing Fishers’ low unemployment and its affordable housing. Classic Cleaners Store has a store at 11501 Geist Pavilion Road) and one at 9538 E. 126th St. in Fishers, with the  Westfield store (14635 N. Gray Rd.) just at Fisher’s western edge.
  
• Meanwhile, the city of Carmel won the Number 14 spot on the Money Magazine list. The article highlighted Carmel’s arts and leisure opportunities and its outstanding math and reading school test scores. Classic Cleaners has no fewer than five stores in Carmel: 5790 E. 131st St., 14550 Clay Terrace Blvd, 9893 N. Michigan Rd), 12707 Meetinghouse Rd.), and 12560 No. Meridian St..
  
• When it comes to retirement, Noblesville is golden”, writes Tom Spalding in the Indianapolis Star, noting that Noblesville was named to MSN’s Sperling’s Best Places. Another accolade for Noblesville was being finalist for the National Civic League’s All-American City Award.

Wherever you live in and around Indianapolis and its northern suburbs, you can take advantage of Classic Cleaners’ free home pick up and delivery services.  From Fortville on the east to Pittsboro on the west, all the way to Cicero on the north, and down to 42nd Street on the south, Classic Cleaners casts a wide net of customer service.

Since 1985, Classic Cleaners has taken pride in its reputation for high quality dry cleaning and laundry along with its superlative customer service.  With all the awards and praise for Carmel, Fishers, and Noblesville, Classic Cleaners can be proud of the company locations it keeps!

 by Reb of the Classic Cleaners blog team

                                                                                                                            Talk about a dry cleaning veteran! What started out as a job between high school and college in St. Louis has turned into a highly successful (forty-six year and counting) dry cleaning career for Jackie!

Chocolates for every season with Jackie Wilson at Classic Cleaners in Clay Terrace

If you’re into chocolates and dry cleaning history, you’ll want to visit with Jackie Wilson at the Clay Terrace Classic Cleaners store in Carmel, Indiana.

Rising rapidly through the ranks of her St. Louis dry cleaning employer from customer service representative to general manager of 25 stores, Jackie arrived in Indianapolis when her husband was transferred here, immediately continuing her work in dry cleaning production management.  June 19th of this year marked Wilson’s four year anniversary with Classic Cleaners.

Asked about the most notable changes she’s seen at Classic Cleaners and in the industry in general, Jackie mentions computerization as the most significant.  The Classic Cleaners process is continually modernized and automated, in sharp contrast to the manual labeling and invoicing that Wilson recalls from earlier years.

Heat seal labeling allows each garment to be scanned in and tracked, with orders assembled and tickets printed, all through an automated process. At Classic Cleaners, the combination of human and machine is the secret behind the quality.  Each week a quality control random check is performed, and the report is reviewed with production staff. When garments are checked in, every button is unbuttoned in preparation for later pressing.  The pockets on each garment are carefully checked for items that might be damaged or lost – or which might stain the garments themselves. Jackie is particularly proud of the compliments she hears every day about the wonderful job Classic Cleaners is doing on men’s shirts.

Jackie’s home, which she shares with her husband Jim (owner of the Altra I Collision body shop), is just across the way from her Classic Cleaners store in Village Farms. Many of her Village Farms neighbors have become loyal customers and fans.

Looking back over the years, Jackie has noticed changing trends. For one, people don’t keep clothes as long as they used to. In her early career days, she recalls, people owned separate suits and dresses for winter and for summer, and dry cleaners often offered winter storage services. Today it’s more common to find people wearing lightweight fabric blends year-round.

Jackie keeps up with the seasons, though, doing it with chocolates! You can always tell which holiday is soon to arrive by the assortment of chocolates on the counter at her store.  ! If you should ever get chocolate on your clothes, though, ‘fess up, pleads Wilson. Telling the truth to your dry cleaner about stains pays off in terms of successful stain removal!

by Reb of the Classic Cleaners blog team

Andretti Race Team uniforms at Classic Cleaners

When the Andretti Auto Sports racing team was looking for the best dry cleaners in Indianapolis to take care of their racing uniforms, their manager made it clear they meant the best green dry cleaners in Indianapolis.

Since the Andretti team is highly environmentally conscious, their managers were happy to learn that Classic Cleaners was the first dry cleaners in Indianapolis to earn the designation Certified Environmental Drycleaner from the Drycleaning & Laundry Institute.

Classic Cleaners veteran Lorraine Rork (manager of the Bash Street store) took the lead on the ambitious project, organizing the pickup and delivery of the garments. The specialty laundering job includes 75 fire suits along with special flame-resistant underclothes and socks for the race team, plus nearly 200 garments for pit crews and other Andretti staff.  Golf shirts for the team are turned in with each order along with the uniforms.

Each of the Andretti garments is labeled with an individual’s name, beginning with the four principal drivers Tony Kaanan, Danika Patrick, Marco Andretti, and Ryan Hunter-Reay. The racing uniforms are made of a polyester-like, quite heavy, flame-retardant fabric called Nomex.  The undergarments and special socks are made of a special cream-colored cotton fabric (Now you know the “inside story”!).

Lorraine Rork considers the Andretti assignment one of the most exciting she’s handled in her more than twelve years with Classic Cleaners.  She’s become a regular racing fan, keeping track of the Andretti Auto Sports team’s latest two July competitions in Canada, and looking forward to cheering them on (from her Bash Street desk) as they compete in Lexington, Ohio next week and in Sonoma, California and Joliet, Illinois later this month.

It’s always a race for the Andretti team. Meanwhile, though, Classic Cleaners takes extra time and special care to protect the environment while producing top-quality cleaning results. It’s not easy being green, but Classic Cleaners knows how important it is to constantly monitor environmental issues and best practices.

It’s a green light all the way to the finish line for the team of Andretti Auto Sports and Classic Cleaners!

 by Reb of the Classic Cleaners blog team

Ring the Bottle

It was come one, come all at the Summer Festival last Friday

Classic Cleaners Store  combined efforts with neighbor merchants at Bridgewater (146th St. and Gray Road) and with other area businesses to offer kids and parents a good time.  

Classic Cleaners Store #14 Manager Misty Elliott

Complete with a “bouncy houses”,  pony rides, and carnival games, the festival offered fun for family members of all ages, with plenty of pizza and Sno Cones available for purchase. (Oops! Dripped Sno Cone color or pizza sauce on your clothes? No worry – you didn’t have far to go to find dry cleaning experts to come to your rescue!) 

In addition to Classic Cleaners, participating sponsors included Gilmore Chiropractic, Fleming Family Dentistry, Cool River Pizza, Bridgewater Café, Walgreen’s, F&M Jolly Trolley Sno Cones, and the Primrose School at Bridgewater. 

Family festivals are always fun, but, invariably hard on kids’ clothes. Even washable garments need to have stains treated before they’re put into the laundry.  The weekend following the Summer Festival proved a great time for families to try out our Classic Cleaners’ Fluff and Fold laundry service, the perfect solution for families with high volumes of laundry and – not enough time! 

Pizza grease on shorts?  Tomato sauce on shirts? Blue Sno-Cone color on everything from socks

Sno Cones for everyone

to skorts? Our Classic Cleaners’ professionals are used to seeing it all following a festival.  After applying our gentle but highly effective laundering methods, we had fun folding and organizing clothes of every size and color into beautifully finished and folded piles – all ready for family fun activities to come! 

 by Reb of the Classic Cleaners blog team

Classic Cleaners Spnsors the Ice Cream Social

Social? Free? Ice Cream? What’s not to love about that threesome? 

Classic Cleaners, always looking for ways to give back to the Carmel community, is involved again this year as an event and a game prize sponsor at the Village of West Clay’s annual family event.  (Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, for our Ring Toss, and YOU could become the proud owner of a beach ball or Frisbee from Classic Cleaners!)

The annual Village of West Clay Ice Cream Social will be held Sunday June 27th on the Village Green.  If you’ve never been to this event, you’re in for a treat, beginning with the big bike parade.

At Classic Cleaners, we get a kick out of sponsoring events like the Ice Cream Social at the Village of West Clay.  Our work, though, starts when the social ends.  After all, when you combine face painting, cupcakes, ice cream, grass, sweaty kids, and sometimes sweatier parents, what do you get? A lot of stained clothes, that’s what!

Perfect opportunity for you to try our Fluff and Fold laundry service. That way, the only reminders of all the fun – and all the resulting messes – will be baskets of fresh, clean family clothing.  And, if Dad’s gotten a little “hot under the collar” (when Junior beat him at Ring Toss), not to worry.  Classic Cleaners’ professionals will pay special attention to the inside collar of his favorite golf shirt, delivering it crisply pressed on a hanger.  (What’s not to love about that?)

It seems like only yesterday that Delores Godwin left her position as RCA group manager to manage the Classic Cleaners store on 62nd and Allisonville Road.  Thankfully, the rest isn’t history, because, 22 1/2 years later, Dee’s still very much an important member of the Classic Cleaners management team.

Now district manager at Classic Cleaners, Dee is greeted with hugs when she stands

Dee Godwin smiles for customers, not for spots!

in at the counter at any of the eight district stores and is spotted by longtime customers. Biggest change in the business she’s noticed over the years?  The new fabric blends.  (In Dee’s early years at Classic Cleaners, most of the clothing was pure wool, silk, or cotton.) One thing that has not changed at all in Dee’s world – the importance of customer service.  “Be friendly, outgoing, and let your customers know you really care about them and their clothes,” Dee teaches new employees.

Asked to identify her favorite aspect of working for a dry cleaners, Dee immediately mentioned stain removal.  “It’s like being a detective.  You don’t always know what the stain is, and you’ve got to use clues, then try the right combination of chemicals and techniques to get that stain out.”

Dee recalls her very first day on the job, when Classic Cleaners’ founding partner Carl Arnold called her attention to something at the back of a machine which he was illuminating with a flashlight.  “Do you see that?” he asked.  “Will you tell me what I’m looking for?” she replied.  Inside the machine, Carl pointed out, was cleaning solution that needed to be “cooked down” to take out dyes and oils and impurities so that the solution could be reused.  Carl was teaching Dee to recognize what level in the machine the solution needed to reach so she’d know it had been fully purified. That lesson would be useful to her for the next twenty two and a half years!

Dee resides with her husband of 46 years, James Godwin (now retired from the former Allied Grocers), and with their two female Jack Russell terriers, P.J. and Peety-Boo. Meanwhile, at work, Dee helps carry on the company’s culture of customer service that helped earn the Classic Cleaners’ “ Best Dry Cleaner in Indy” rating.

The famous Lady Macbeth line from Shakespeare is “Out, Out, Damned Spot!”. But, unlike the evil Lady Macbeth, Dee Godwin is interested in doing her very best to serve Classic Cleaners’ customers!

by Reb of the Classic Cleaners blog team

“Shorts are a garment worn by both men and women over their pelvic area, covering the upper part of the legs,” begins a Wikipedia write-up. “They are called ‘shorts‘ because they are a shortened version of trousers, which cover the entire leg.”

Yes, we know. 

the long and the short of - shorts!

IN FACT, THE JUNE MONTHLY SPECIAL AT CLASSIC CLEANERS
IS $3.00 OFF EACH PAIR OF SHORTS!

Shorts styles have changed over the many years our Classic Cleaners technicians have been taking care of clients’ clothes.  Whatever type of shorts you can name – you can bet we’ve cleaned or laundered shorts just like those. (At Classic Cleaners, we check the care label instructions on each garment to see if your shorts belong with your fluff-and-fold laundry order or should be dry cleaned.)
 
Cargo shorts? You bet our professional dry cleaners in Broad Ripple have handled those!.  (Cargo shorts have numerous pockets – don’t forget to search the pockets before turning them over to be dry cleaned or professionally laundered and pressed.)

Bike shorts? Check.  (Originally worn by cyclists to reduce thigh chafing, bike shorts have been adopted as street wear for women under tops or under skirts, our dry cleaners in Carmel. see quite a number of these.)

Jeans shorts? Of course.  (Made out of denim,  jeans shorts may also be called “jorts”. Jeans shorts are popular with both men and women, our Indianapolis dry cleaning technicians report.)

Board shorts? Even those.  (Board shorts were originally designed for surf boarders, but men often wear this easy-going combination of shorts and a bathing suit. Our Classic Cleaners pickup route in Cicero often brings in board shorts.)

Zip-offs? Yes.  (Zip-off shorts are long pants that zip off at the knee, so the wearer can go from pants to shorts and back as the weather changes.)

Flood pants? My, yes.  (These go down as far as the calf, so they’re sometimes called “shants”.)
 
Skorts? Rarely, but yes. (These shorts have a piece of fabric in front that makes them look like a skirt.  The style shows up at our Carmel dry cleaners location every so often.).  

From creased khaki shorts to plaid golf shorts and everything in between, the long and the short of it is this:

When it comes to shorts, at Classic Cleaners, we’ve seen ‘em all!

by Reb of the Classic Cleaners blog team

The debate rages on.

Lockers - Classic Cleaners', not Davey Jones'!

Linguists and historians can’t seem to agree on the origins of the expression “Davey Jones’ Locker”

(referring to the bottom of the sea where drowned sailors go).

Meanwhile, there’s no debating the fact that Indy’s best dry cleaners has installed drop-off   (These lockers are very dry and definitely above ground!)

lockers in a dozen of its retail locations.

The first mention of Davey Jones was in a book, published in 1751, called The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. “This same Davy Jones, according to sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep,” wrote author Tobias Smollett.

A second theory is that “Davey” equals “Duffy”, the West Indiana term for ghost, and that “Jones” stands for “Jonah”, whom God punished by causing him to be swallowed by a whale.

There’s more.  A 1594 song called “Jones’ Ale is Newe” told of a pub owner who threw drunken sailors into his ale locker and then dumped the lockers onto passing ships.

I can assure you – at Classic Cleaners, lockers are used for convenience, not punishment.  Our lockers are for holding clothes, not ale or sailors!)

Working late? Just returned from vacation? It’s so convenient to drop off your personalized express dry cleaning bag in the secure chute.  We do the rest.  Then, once your clothes are ready for pickup, we store them in a locker accessible by your personalized PIN.

Next time you visit us at Classic Cleaners, tell the manager you’re ready to sign up for your very own locker services.

You can hear the Davey Jones name right in the U.S. Navy song, Anchors Aweigh. “Sail on to victory, and sink their bones to Davey Jones, hooray!”, the words go.

At Classic Cleaners, we won’t be sinking anybody’s bones. Every so often, though, after seeing how beautifully a problem garment turned out under Classic Cleaners specialists’ expert care, customers do let out a “Hooray” or two!

by Reb of the Classic Cleaners blog team