Building Your Wardrobe

3 Tips To Care For Your Embroidered Apparel

Clothing acts as a medium through which you can express your personal sense of style. Adding custom embroidery to a piece of clothing can further enhance your self-expression.

Custom embroidery gives a plain piece of clothing the added flair needed to turn it into a statement piece. Unfortunately, many embroidered clothing items have been ruined because they weren't cared for properly.

Here are three tips that you can use to properly care for your embroidered apparel in the future.

1. Wash Embroidered Items Carefully

The safest way to wash your embroidered apparel is by hand. If you decide that you want to use a washing machine instead, you must use extreme caution.

Always turn an embroidered clothing item inside out so that the threaded design is protected from any type of abrasions that might occur during the wash cycle.

Avoid washing your embroidered clothing items with any apparel that has zippers, metal buttons, or other hardware. These clothing items could potentially damage the treading on an embroidered piece, cause the threads to come loose, and ruin the overall design.

2. Always Air Dry

You should never put embroidered apparel in a mechanical dryer. The high temperatures reached within a dryer drum can easily damage the delicate threading of a custom embroidered clothing item.

Always air-dry your embroidered items to preserve the integrity of their design. Air drying will also help you avoid any material shrinkage that might result in the pulling of the threads in an embroidered design.

Embroidered apparel will always last longer when you take the time to air dry.

3. Iron Embroidered Items Carefully

Air drying can often result in some wrinkles left behind on your embroidered clothing items. It is perfectly safe to iron these wrinkles out — as long as you are ironing carefully.

Always place a pressing cloth between the embroidered area and your iron. This will prevent the threading from becoming singed or damaged when exposed to the heat of the iron.

Make sure that you turn off the steam feature on your iron before working on any embroidered clothing. Steam can cause the stabilizer material found on the backside of an embroidered design to shrink up. This shrinkage can give the embroidery a puckered look that can never be ironed away.

Custom embroidery can be costly, so you want to ensure you are caring for all of your custom-embroidered apparel properly.

To learn more, contact a custom embroidery service provider in your area/