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Cleaning Angel – The Wedding Dress Specialists
Based in Hart’s Corner, Glasnevin, we believe that we are Ireland’s best wedding dress cleaners. We mostly clean dresses in Dublin, Kildare, Meath and Wicklow, where we provide free collection & delivery. We also do wedding dress cleaning for customer across many other counties on a regular basis, including Carlow, Wexford, Laois, Westmeath, Offaly and Louth so contact us where ever you are based!
1. Is it a good idea to get my wedding dress cleaned?
Yes, definitely. The longer stains are left, the more difficult they are to remove!
Ideally, we recommend that you get your wedding dress cleaned as soon after your wedding as is practicable to ensure best possible results. The sooner stains are treated the higher the likelihood that they will be fully removed. Left on garments for an extended period of time, stains can become embedded in the threads of the fabric meaning that they are more difficult, and sometimes impossible, to remove without damaging the fabric.
That said we have cleaned dresses many years after they were worn and the results have been fantastic so definitely worth doing.
Irrespective as to whether you plan to keep your wedding dress for posterity, sell it on or have it made into a christening gown or communion dress, pressing and cleaning wedding gowns is always a good idea.
2. How much does it cost to get your wedding dress cleaned?
Get a quick quote using our on line Wedding Dress Cleaning Price Calculator – it’s simple to use & will give you an instant quote.
You just need to tell us about your dress by answering 4 simple questions :
- Type of Material – Silk & Raw Silk cost a little extra as they are difficult fabrics to clean and hence take more time
- Number of Layers of fabric – the more layers the more time it takes to pre-treat your wedding dress before it’s cleaned. Every inch of fabric is inspected and all stains / marks found are treated to get the best possible results
- Train – 4 options to choose from here
- Dress Does Not Touch the Ground i.e. your dress is not full length and hence the bottom of the dress is unlikely to be badly soiled
- Dress Touches the Ground but it doesn’t have a train
- Trailing Train – Train on your dress is up to 1’ long
- Long Train – train on your dress is longer than a 1’ long
In general the longer the train the more work there is involved in cleaning your dress, hence it’s slightly more expensive
Trains can be badly soiled, particularly where you have been outdoors having photos taken or have hit the dance floor!!! We consider it to be the sign of a good day !!!
- Embellishments
Does your dress have pearls / beads , crystals / diamonds or other embellishments e.g. a brooch or other adornment ? These are typically found on the bodice of wedding dresses or around the arms or waistband.
Extra care is required when cleaning wedding dresses with embellishments to ensure they do not damage the dress while it’s being cleaned. If we have any concerns and the embellishment can be removed it will be taken to our specialist alterations partner, removed prior to cleaning and then re-attached once your dress has been cleaned. This will be done at the discretion of our specialist dry cleaner at no extra cost to you.
Taking great care of your precious wedding dress is always our top priority and we’ll make every effort we can to ensure best possible results.
Your quote includes the following:
- Cleaning & pressing your wedding veil
- Cleaning & pressing a bolero jacket
- Free collection & delivery if you are based in Dublin, Kildare, Meath or Wicklow. We do provide a collection & delivery service elsewhere in Ireland for a modest additional cost – please contact us to find out more
If you have a separate underskirt or overskirt there is an extra cost for cleaning these – typically €30 - €80 depending on the amount of fabric, etc
3. My wedding dress has a solid adornment on it. Can you clean it?
Yes we can.
If we feel that it would be safer to have the adornment removed before your wedding dress is cleaned we’ll arrange to have this done by our specialist alterations partner. This decision will be made by our wedding dress cleaning specialist, who has over 35 years experience cleaning wedding dresses. If we do remove the adornment we’ll arrange to have it re-attached once your wedding dress has been cleaned so it will be returned to you as we received it, just freshly cleaned & pressed.
This will be done at no extra cost to you. We always prefer to go to extra trouble rather than risk damaging your precious wedding dress.
4. How Do I Arrange to have my Wedding Dress Collected for Cleaning ?
There are a few options here
- Ring us on 01 25 44 222 and have a chat with us. We’ll be delighted to answer any questions you might have and we’ll also arrange a date and time to collect your dress that works for you
- Indicate a preferred Collection Date when using our online Wedding Dress Cleaning Price Calculator and we’ll contact you to get your full address and agree the collection date and time
E-mail us on [email protected] and we’ll get back to you within a couple of hours
5. Can you clean your wedding dress, at home yourself?
There are many online articles on cleaning wedding gowns yourself. So, should you, or should you go to a specialist wedding dress cleaners?
Approach
Wedding Dress Cleaning Specialists approach cleaning wedding dresses very differently to any of the suggestions that online articles make. This is primarily because those articles are correctly assuming that you won’t have any of the tools and solvents that are available to genuine wedding gown specialist cleaners. These tools and solvents increase the quality of result that specialists can achieve.
How to Clean a Wedding Gown
Firstly, on a spotting table, we examine every wedding dress inch by inch, under bright lights. The source of each stain is identified and treated accordingly.
Across the day, wedding gowns pick up a wide variety of stains, from mud or dust at the bottom of the dress, to food, wine, lipstick or tan stains. We treat each of these stains differently, with different solvents specifically designed to remove that type of stain on your specific type of dress material. These solvents are expensive and only available to dry cleaners, but they are very effective at cleaning wedding gowns. We can also use a wide variety of tools which you would not have at home.
Once the stains on the dress have been treated, we then clean the whole gown.
After cleaning, we then re-examine the stains and the dress to see the success of the treatments. We will start at the beginning again to re-treat and re-clean the dress if any stains remain until the stains disappear completely or stop to improve.
Will cleaning your wedding gown at home be a success?
Anything approach involving wedding dress cleaning at home takes a very broad approach and therefore a big risk. Depending on the material and stains, cleaning your dress using one of the online approaches at home may lead to some success, but may also leave some stains still visible and sometimes will actually damage the material.
Unfortunately, once you have attempted to clean a stain at home and fail, it often ‘sets the stain in the thread’. This means that nothing, even our specialist solvents are no longer likely to remove those stains and the dress is forever ruined.
Pressing
After the dress has been cleaned, we then press the dress. This is achieved through a combination of very specialist presses, that many dry cleaners won’t even have and then we hand finish the gown. Pressing a wedding dress is typically only completed by very experienced wedding dress cleaners to achieve a good result.
Most Valuable Garment you own
Your wedding gown is a valuable garment, both financially and sentimentally. Lets face it, it’s probably the most valuable garment you will ever own. Do you want to take a chance on cleaning such a valuable garment yourself? Many dry cleaners today won’t take the chance of cleaning wedding gowns they know they don’t have sufficient experience. Often, they send any wedding gowns that they get in to a wedding dress specialist cleaners, such as ourselves.
Conclusion.
It unlikely that you will get a good result with cleaning a wedding gown at home and once you try, even specialist dry cleaners may only be able to improve it a bit, but may also be hamstrung in the approaches that they can now take.
