Laminates Session 3: How to Care for and Store

We are now gonna talk a little bit about how to care for and how to store your laminates. The great part about laminates is that you can clean them off with a household cleaner. This beach bag I take everywhere with me. I even take it camping. So sometimes I can put my knitting in here and I'll drag it out to the fire and then it kind of sits in the dirt a little while. But when I get home, all I have to do is just spray it down with 409 and wipe it up. I dropped it in the mud once and I took it out to the backyard and I turned the hose on it just to spray all the dried mud off and that worked really great too. Then I just let it air dry and it cleaned right up. Now, when you're storing your laminates it's best to roll them up. We don't want to fold them. The wrinkles are hard to get out of here. It's not like a cotton where you can just turn on hot steam and iron the wrinkles right out. So ideally you want to roll it up and if you're doing the laminated cotton, that tends to wilt because it's so flexible, so that one's better if you roll it around a tube and store it that way. Now, if you have to iron it then there's a couple different ways. Now laminated cotton can actually be ironed at a low heat. It is cotton, so it will respond very nicely to the heat. However, I have a tip for you. I would use a pressing cloth like this. So that way you have two layers of fabric between your iron and the laminate on the other side. Okay? So my tip for you here is turn your iron to a very low setting. Give it a little rub down, peek, see if that got rid of the wrinkle. If it didn't turn it up just a little bit, try again. It doesn't really take too much heat in this case to get rid of the wrinkles here so you have to be very careful so that you don't melt the laminate. It's also a good idea to test with a swatch. If you want to cut off the salvage edge right here and just leave yourself a little, just so that you can make sure you get the iron to a good heat without melting it. The cotton, you can definitely use a pressing cloth with and use your iron with. Now this piece of oil cloth here, for example, is pretty wrinkly. You can tell I kind of had it rolled and then I stuffed another project on top of it and it smashed it and now I have all of these wrinkles. Okay? Now this one isn't too bad. So I could attempt to use a pressing cloth but I'm kind of afraid to do that with the iron because I could melt it. And when you're starting to learn to sew with these, you don't want to take any extra risks. So my tip for you is get your iron nice and hot. Put it all the way to cotton and then warm up your ironing board, just like this. Give it a nice, good iron so that the whole thing is nice and warm. Then you're going to put this on it and you're going to use your hands to press it. Just the warmth from the pressing board into your fabric will be enough and the strength of your hands to kind of pull those wrinkles out will smooth it out very, very nicely. Now, the last thing you can do, and I do this with chalk cloth all the time. Chalk cloth is a laminate that's extremely similar to oil cloth except for on the front side of it, it's treated with chalk so you can dry, it's treated with a chalk paint so you can draw on it with chalk. Now that stuff tends to get pretty wrinkly but in the summer I can throw it out on my porch and if you just lay it out just like this the sun will heat it really, really nicely. And if you leave it out there for like an hour the wrinkles will go away and it'll be a nice flat piece for you to work with. Now, we're gonna talk about how to cut this stuff.