National Clothesline

ou’ve probably heard this one before, but still I bet that your presser is doing it wrong right now. I’m talking about the “collar frown.” When a presser is about to press a collar, the seam that is formed when the collar is sewn to the collar band needs to be curled a bit in the shape of a “frown,” that is, an arc pointing downward.

This is either really easy to do to rather difficult. I’ll tell you why in a minute.

For now, look at Figure 1. This collar is improperly placed on the buck. The collar band — the part of the shirt that the collar is sewn to — curves upward, away from the operator. This is bad for two reasons.

First, notice the extreme left of shirt in Figure 1. A little too much of the shirt is on the buck. This surely will cause an errant pressed-in crease. This will either be touched up or it won’t be. You decide which is worse.

Second, the shirt won’t hang on the hanger properly. Have you ever seen such a shirt? It is properly pressed; nothing really seems obviously wrong but something about it doesn’t look right. It just might be that the collar was pressed incorrectly.

There is irony in this particular tip, unfortunately. There are some shirts that will come to your presser with a somewhat exaggerated “smile” arc and you won’t be able to fix it. Too bad, because it really needs it. The shirt has a “fused” collar that has shrunk. The customer doesn’t notice the shrinking because the collar band hasn’t shrunk. A fused collar is a collar that is manufactured to always look like it has heavy starch. This effect is achieved by fusing the fabric to interfacing and resin, resulting in a stiff-as-cardboard collar.

In Figure 2, the collar is placed slightly different on the buck. The collar band is placed essentially parallel to the front line of the buck and then curled back a little bit to create a “frown.” As I said, some shirts won’t allow you to do this, but if you can, don’t skip this step.

Fiddling with the backs of the shirts not only affects the quality, but it also wreaks havoc on productivity.

Often a presser will pull on the sides and down the middle of the back while dressing the shirt. Often, one pull undoes the other.

On most presses, pull on the sides of shirts that have side pleats on the back — and don’t pull on the middle — it will undo what good you just did by pulling on the sides.

Conversely, when there is a center box pleat, don’t fiddle with the sides, but you will need to ease out the air bubble that often forms under the pleat by passing your hand downward from the top of the pleat. Many pressers choreograph an inexplicable series of tucks and pulls that are completely unnecessary and often lead to poorer quality results. This whole lot of the motions has become a habit for your presser, which is most unfortunate, because breaking that habit can be a bear.

Placement of sleeves on a sleeve press

Sometimes a shirt that was just pressed has ugly, sharply pressed-in wrinkles that extend inboard from the seam that connects the sleeve to the body of the shirt. These are caused because the sleever pressed too much of the shirt. Rather than just pressing the sleeve and nothing more, this front part of the body of the shirt was also pressed by the steam chests in the sleever.

The result is never pretty. Why does this happen and how do prevent it, you ask?

There are four things that will cause this, and for three of the causes the fix is easy. The fourth is something that we need to live with.

The measuring device on the sleeve press allows the machine to adjust itself to different lengths of sleeves. This is usually done by lifting or lowering a measuring arm. Most presses have a light that shines its beam onto the shirt. The idea is to move the measuring arm so that the beam of light shines directly on the seam that is formed when the sleeve is sewn to the rest of the shirt. When the machine is properly adjusted, the press heads will press only the part of the shirt that is above the light beam.

Note the phrase “when the machine is properly adjusted.” This suggests that you can do something about this if it is out of adjustment.

To see if your machine is out of adjustment or not, follow this simple procedure: With the measuring device at any level, place a piece of masking tape on the sleeve buck and draw a dot exactly where the light beam shines. Now, without moving the measuring arm, send the buck into the pressing position. Draw a line directly underneath the press head. It should intersect the dot that you drew in the previous step. If it doesn’t, see your owner’s manual for instructions on how to adjust it.

This is not a big deal. Get it done. Don’t ask your presser to compensate for the machine’s malfunction by saying something like “just shine the light beam an inch below the seam and it will work fine.” If you want them to try to do perfect work, try to make the machines work perfectly. You won’t accept excuses, don’t give any.

Sometimes the sleeves on a particular shirt will be shorter than the shortest setting on the press. The result will be the same ugly wrinkles that we are talking about. This is the cause that you can’t do anything about. We have to suck it up and remember that this is the reason that we have a touch-up department. The department does not exist so that the pressers can do a lousy job and touch-up gets to do the shirt over again, by hand. It exists to do the parts of a shirt that the equipment is incapable of doing.

The third way to get those wrinkles is to simply not bother using the measuring device, reasoning that “I can press faster if I don’t use it.”

Silly. The body of the shirt needs to be sprayed with water to have any chance that the wrinkles will be pressed out while the body is pressed. When this is done, the same wrinkles on the back of the shirt are rarely, if ever, sprayed. The result, of course, is inferior quality.

Management needs to be certain that the equipment is running properly and that proper pressing procedures are followed. That’s what management is for.

But there is a way that we can get these wrinkles with properly adjusted equipment operated by a properly trained employee. If one sleeve is lower on the buck than the other sleeve, one of the sleeves will be over-pressed or one will be under-pressed. If the light beam shines on the seam that is lower on the buck, the other sleeve — higher up on the adjacent buck — will get those ugly wrinkles.

It’s easy to fix this. Train your pressers to use the cuff button as a gauge to indicate how high or low to place the sleeve on the buck. The cuff clip should be directly underneath the cuff button on both sleeves. This will assure that when the measuring device is aimed at the one seam, that seam speaks for both.

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got.”

Donald Desrosiers has been in the shirt laundering business since 1978 and is a work-flow systems engineer who provides services to shirt launderers through Tailwind Shirt Systems, 867 Spencer St., Fall River, MA. He can be reached by phone at (508) 965-3163 or by e-mail at tailwind1@comcast.net and he has web sites located at: www.tailwindshirts.com and www.dondesrosiers.com