Preserving Your Wedding Dress
You're reading Preserving Your Wedding Dress, posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 1:52 pm in Wedding Attire, on BrainBloggers at the Wedding Plans blog. More after the jump.
Your wedding dress is one of the most important outfits that you will ever wear and because of that you want to make sure that you can show off for years to come. In order to do this you want to preserve it for your children and their children.
Preservation provides a means of maintaining the quality and appearance of a gown through customized cleaning and appropriate storage. Methods range from savvy self-storage (in a temperate, dry, dark location) to museum-quality preservation.
Professional preservationists analyze the fabrics, dyes, weaves, and ornaments of your gown, as well as the composition of stains in order to formulate a customized cleaning plan. In removing invisible soils and other stains from the gown, they remove the potential fabric damage that results when these substances embed in the fabric and undergo chemical reactions. After cleaning, the gown is carefully wrapped in stable archival materials and packaged in an archival Coroplast box (the storage box of choice for most major museums) and should be protected from extreme temperatures, moisture, and exposure to direct sunlight.
The price of cleaning and preservation will vary with the complexity of a gown’s beadwork, train length, and stain damage. A local high-end dry cleaner will charge as much as $100 for standard dry cleaning. Specialized gown preservationists will normally charge between $250 and $500.