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People expect dry cleaners to work magic.
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Taken to the cleaners
Sarah O'Meara25/ 4/2008
"THERE'S no way I would use a dry cleaner. I don't trust them," says mother-of-two, Shannon Lush. But although she might sound like a cranky, old-fashioned housewife, millions value her opinion.
A leading authority on stain removal, the professional fine arts restorer, has a deep knowledge of traditional cleaning techniques. Having done more for sales of oil-of-cloves in her home country of Australia, than Delia did for cranberries, she is the author of best-selling cleaning manual Spotless.
And when a recent survey by consumer organisation Which? said just one in 12 items come back from British dry cleaners in an acceptable condition, the author isn't at all surprised.
"It's a world-wide problem," she says. "People expect too much from them but you can do far more at home than a dry cleaner can."
Preferring to use natural products like vinegar and unprocessed wheat bran to get rid of stains, Shannon gets frustrated when people assume they can't solve their problems at home.
"Dry cleaning isn't magic!" she says. "To start off with, it's not `dry' it's `wet' cleaning. The only difference is they use solvents instead of water. These solvents are good at removing organic material like grass stains and vegetable juices. But the moment the stain is oil-based they can't do anything. The dry cleaners will immerse the item in a vat of solvent, hang it up and use a vertical steam iron. That's it.
"At one time dry cleaners had a range of skills but now they can only do one basic type of cleaning. I've had dry cleaning companies asking me if I'll write a book for them because so much information about cleaning techniques has been lost."
Tricks
With a million tricks up her sleeves for dealing with common stains, Shannon says there is usually no reason to use strong solvents on your favourite clothes.
"Say you've a grubby overcoat - perfect to take to the dry cleaners - instead of taking it, you can clean it with a pillow case, a kilo of unprocessed wheat bran and a small amount of white vinegar."
The noise on the end of the phone, alerts Shannon to the fact that I find her suggestion rather alarming. But thankfully she perseveres.
"Put the unprocessed wheat bran in a large bowl and stir it while adding one drop at a time of white vinegar, until the mixture clumps together like a lump of brown sugar (it should not feel wet). Then stick it in an old pillow case, put the garment in, tie off the top and shake. The vinegar will help break down the fats, oils and skin cells which build up on clothes, and the bran will act as a mild abrasive, removing all the muck. Then all you have to do is shake it out and it's done. And this process is no more or less effective than what they do at the dry cleaners."
It's tips like these that will surely make her new book, Speedcleaning, a huge success.
Generation to generation
Shannon grew up in a household where tips were passed down from generation to generation. "Whereas in some families, the information about how to be housewives and mothers got lost, it didn't in our family.
"I learned my first stain removal tip when I was four. My grandmother taught me how to get ink out of fabric. With rotten milk. I thought she was having me on."
Not satisfied unless she manages to perfectly restore anything with a mark, she can vividly remember some of her biggest challenges.
"Somebody bought in nine suitcases full of silk clothing which had been stored in a basement. The basement had flooded and everything had filled with mould. You opened a case and it was like something out of a horror movie. The mould was moving. Each item had to be hand laundered and each speck of mould removed.
"I used oil of cloves. Most people use bleach for mould, but it doesn't kill the spore, it just bleaches it white. So the mould will come back. Oil of cloves kills the spore and you only need the tiniest amount. A quarter of a teaspoon per litre of water."
Shannon says that advances in the cleaning industry, have created a generation of people dependent on products, rather than remedies.
"We've tried to make things `easy care' for people and in the process we've lost the care. Many of the things our mothers and grandmothers did weren't that difficult but a lot of household wisdom has gone by the wayside.
"For example, if you want to get blood out of a mattress you rub it with a cake of soap and a damp cloth and it's gone. But now most people do all the wrong thing and set it. It's pretty simple, but if you don't know it's not simple."
Pledge to clean up their act:
AN independent consumer team from Which? stained 48 identitcal skirts with red wine, double cream and vinaigrette and took them to independent cleaners including Johnson's Cleaners, Morrisons and Persil Service. Just four returned the skirt in an acceptable condition. And just 10 of 31 shops that failed to remove the stains owned up. Other problems included shrinkage, the addition of stains and a failure to press items to an adequate standard.
Neil Fowler, Editor of Which? said: "It's not cheap to get your clothes dry cleaned, yet we got shoddy resultsfrom the vast majority of the cleaners we tested. The industry has vowed to clean up after its act and so it should."
For Shannon's tips on how to get stains out, just click on the related article link on the right....
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