Handmade in the small English town of Honiton, the lace on Queen Victoria’s wedding gown took more than one hundred lace makers more than six months to create. When the queen married Prince Albert in 1840, she started a trend by wearing a white dress – before that, white gowns were quite unusual.

To this day, lace adds a beautiful romantic touch to garments, especially wedding and christening gowns. Two famous types of lace are Chantilly and Alencon; each can come embroidered with seed beads and pearls.

The delicate surface of lace demands special sewing techniques – and special lace dry cleaning care. If the holes in the lace are large, there is even greater danger of snagging and tearing (this is especially true with vintage wedding gowns).

One of the wedding gown dry cleaning challenges the professionals at Classic Cleaners face comes from stains accumulating around the beaded edges of lace. The “terrible threes”, sugars, salts, and acids, do the kind of damage to wedding gowns with which conventional dry cleaning methods cannot cope.

 The clean, safe, and unique methods of wedding gown hand cleaning, dry cleaning and preservation perfected over the years by Classic Cleaners have kept many a lacy wedding gown in an enchanting state of perfection!

by Reb of the Classic Cleaners blog team

“People calling themselves ‘ironists’ get a thrill from taking their ironing board, unplugged iron, and some of

Extreme Ironist

their wrinkly clothes to some extreme places and photograph themselves doing it. Such places include extreme altitude, underwater, hanging from cliffs, and on top of vehicles,” relates sportzfun.com.

Most of our customers would prefer to avoid ironing even in the safety of their own home, much less hanging from a cliff or perched atop a vehicle. They much prefer to leave the ironing to the expert “ironists” at Classic Cleaners!

And nowhere is the Classic Cleaners expertise in ironing more apparent – and more appreciated – than when it comes to men’s and women’s shirts. Truth be told, our “ironists” do have expert help from the latest technology, including our Unipress machine for shirts.

Typical “Pet Peeve C’s ” that simply don’t happen with Classic Cleaners-style shirt processing:

• Clamp marks on shirts (A Classic Cleaners-processed shirt can be worn tucked in – or out -  with confidence)
• Crinkled facing on collar (A Classic Cleaners-processed shirt can be worn open-necked with confidence)
• Cracked buttons  (Classic Cleaners replaces cracked buttons and repairs loose ones)

Sorry, we don’t iron underwater or in the alps, but we certainly do turn a proud face on men’s and women’s shirts at Classic Cleaners!

 by Reb of the Classic Cleaners blog team

Route manager Tommy Mitrani

All the research data isn’t in yet, but it’s looking as if Tom Mitrani might qualify as one of the best- educated route managers in the dry cleaning and laundry industry.

For eight of his thirteen years as a full-time employee of Classic Cleaners, Tom has been a part time student.  Now Mitrani is set to graduate from the Kelly School of business at IUPUI with a Bachelor of Science in Marketing and International Studies.

No, Classic Cleaners doesn’t deliver to China or Dubai, but the sheer logistics of managing twelve routes serving several thousand customers spread out from Cicero on the north, Fortville on the east, and Pittsboro on the west demand that Mitrani makes good use of his business management education.

How does the route system work? When you sign up for the free service, you’ll be provided with special large bags for your clothing.  Most customers stick a note inside the bag with any special questions or requests. A Classic Cleaners driver visits your home or office twice weekly to pick up and deliver your items. Your clean garments are returned neatly bagged, with fluff-and-fold laundry returned in recyclable boxes. However, there’s no obligation to have anything for us to pick up at all on every visit.

If you’re not at home when the driver arrives, your clothes may be left on special hanger hooks which Classic Cleaners provides to slide over the top of your door. You may prefer to give the driver access so that you have your clothing hung in your front closet, mud room or garage – simply let the driver know your preference. Last-minute emergency? Need a garment back in a hurry?  All Classic Cleaners drivers have company cell phones meant to help accommodate special requests. 

Adult children often arrange for Classic Cleaners home delivery for an aging parent.  The reverse is also true – one mother arranged home pickup and delivery of shirts for her son, so that he’d be sure to look his best at his new job!.

Think about it – thousands of customers, thousands of different residential and office locations, tens of thousands of garments every week, on time, ready to wear – it all adds up to a challenge worthy of the best efforts of a business school graduate like Tom Mitrani!

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