Many clothes i.e. dresses, shirts, trousers, etc are hand made by local tailors.  This is fine but many fabrics are not suitable for washing or dry cleaning and may shrink or loose colour on the first occasion you wash or dry-clean them.  Therefore, fabrics used for hand-made tailoring i.e. dresses, shirts, trousers and especially curtains and upholstery fabrics need to be washed or dry cleaned before tailoring.  Any loose colour will run out of the fabric and natural shrinkage will occur.  The items can then be safely washed or dry-cleaned with minimum further colour loss or shrinkage after tailoring.

Hand-made dresses often have fancy trims i.e. sequins, beads, lace, etc and these can be a problem.  Ask your dry cleaner, if the sequins, fancy trimmings etc will loose their colour, shine or shape in the dry cleaning process.  Glues used to attach sequins; beads, etc may be a problem in the dry cleaning process if they are not strong and will fall apart.

Stains: Stains must be washed or dry cleaned immediately.  Allowing 2 or 3 days for any stain to ‘set’ will increase the possibility of the stain not being removed 100%.

Buttons: Expensive buttons may break in the wash or dry clean process and you may not find the same buttons to replace them.  So please remove them, or ask our shop manager to remove them for you.  We will re-sew them after the garment has been cleaned.

Washing symbols/codes
The symbols/codes are used internationally to provide help and advice when cleaning different garments.

Washing – Wash temperature maximum
Temperature based on the number
Hand Wash
Do not wash in water

Ironing – The number of dots indicates the max* recommended temp.
Hot
Medium
Cool
Non-Iron

Dry Cleaning
A circle symbolizes dry cleaning
Articles normal for dry cleaning
Articles for dry cleaning in perchlone
Articles normal for dry cleaning in fluorocarbon 113 or white spirit
Do not dry clean

Bleaching – A triangle symbolizes bleaching.
Bleach-able
Do not bleach

Drying – A rectangle symbolizes drying.
Suitable for tumble drying
Do not tumble dry

Wool
If garments bear the IWS or superwash mark it can be machine washed
Use only gentle action and a temperature No higher than 400 C