More on that wedding dress.
I washed it in Dawn soap and then let it soak in a diluted solution of a commercial product that uses hydrogen peroxide and is not named Oxyclean. This took out a lot of the brown discoloration in the fabric. I was thinking of it as linen at that moment, and I know that linen naturally darkens with age, so I didn’t worry about getting out all the brown. Probably a good thing because …
… I took the dress for a consult with a friend. I wanted her input on how to display it. She thinks the dress is silk. She did have other comments about the detail in the stitches and the way the material feels. She also said that places that did framing would know how to do a proper display.

The easiest part … I went to a craft shop and they showed me how they mount clothing. They sew it to a matte board by hand. So, no pins. Then they use a deep frame so that they don’t crush the cloth. And the clerk was quite excited by the idea of the dress. So good, when I get that far.

However, in the meantime, the material is wrinkled, and I had considered ironing it. You don’t iron silk and linen the same way. You ruin silk if you try that. But, fortunately, I hadn’t touched it with an iron yet, and before I left my friend handed me her steamer, and told me not to let it get the dress itself wet.

I had several questions in my mind at this point. How do I tell if this is silk? How do I remove wrinkles? If it is silk, can more brown be removed? I wasn’t going to try if it was linen, based on my understanding of the Shroud of Turin. But then, they probably didn’t try soaking that material in diluted white vinegar which is what is suggested for silk.

Some people might wonder (are wondering, vocally) why I haven’t just taken the garment to a dry cleaner. I’m definitely getting closer to doing that, but long ago my mother gave me a beautiful silk tablecloth. It got stained, and the local dry cleaner wouldn’t touch it. Wouldn’t discuss it. Wanted nothing to do with it. Kinda ruined my belief in dry cleaners, even though that was thirty years ago, in another state.

At all events, I asked Google if silk darkens with age. In one response, the question was rephrased to read, “How do you clean dingy white silk?” The answer was to mix distilled white vinegar with warm water and swish the garment around, then rinse it off. This answer was illustrated with a picture of a black garment being swished around in a basin of water. Not filling me with confidence there, kids, although lemon juice and vinegar, carefully diluted and tested, does seem to be the most universally accepted method.

There was some fairly intense discussion about using a product like Oxyclean. I’m betting that the company that actually has that name would say no. There is a universal idea that you don’t use bleach. Okay. Is Clorox2 a bleach? It uses hydrogen peroxide … but the Clorox company says don’t do it. But a lot of other people say, do use hydrogen peroxide, since it isn’t sodium hypochlorite (that’s Clorox bleach). I guess I’m lucky I still have a garment to hold. In some cases, when you do the wrong thing you take a cobweb out of the water after you put a garment in.

Reading a few of these sites shows how stupid looking up information on the internet really is, since they contradict each other blatantly. In one particularly annoying case, the article was written in really fractured English, and disagreed with itself between the beginning and the end of the article. I secretly wondered if it was AI.

I did keep looking. I wonder what that says about me…

Since linen and silk are completely different, silk being an animal product, actually a protein, whereas linen is fiber from a plant, it is unlikely that the same product is best for both. Not impossible, I guess, but definitely unlikely. Also, many articles say that some yellowing is due to environmental factors, and to keep either silk or linen out of sunlight. This seems like a legitimate point.

A distracting article here (https://lalouettesilk.com/blog/what-is-silk/#:~:text=) explains why silk has a lovely sheen. Basically the proteins are stacked in flat packets that point in different directions. This makes silk a good reflector.

I found both a Lithuanian site discussing linen, and an Australian one. Interestingly, the Lithuanian linen site had some lovely clothes, but the way they hung on the models made me think I really do have some other material.

I guess what I really should be researching at this point IS the best dry cleaner around here.

Rabbit Hole Alert! And as the world’s champion rabbit hole diver, I found a site discussing gifts of silk vestments during the late 700’s. Pope Hadrian I and Pope Leo III are specifically mentioned. However, there is an odd comment that silk donations increased at this time, perhaps because of the iconoclastic controversy. That makes no sense to me since the author is discussing garments with figures on them. But it’s not my primary interest here…
https://textilesocietyofamerica.org/6326/the-impact-of-silk-in-the-middle-ages