Iron a Dress Shirt

You can iron a dress shirt faster and get better results by following these step-by-step instructions. With a little practice, you can look like you send your shirts out to be pressed.

Steps

Getting the Perfect Setup

1. Begin with a clean, high quality iron. A cheap iron is more likely to have problems, clog, or burn your clothes.
2. Fill the water chamber in the iron with distilled water. Tap water can clog the steam function on your iron over time. Use distilled water or bottled water, if you can.
3. Adjust the height of the ironing board to your waist level. Be sure the floor underneath is clean.
   • If you don't have an ironing board put clean bath towels on a table top.
4. Have a place to hang your item. If you are ironing more than one dress shirt or more than one item, have hangers and a place to hang the shirt while the other items are being ironed. A nearby chair or a door handle can do in a pinch.
5. Get a hand towel or two. You will need the hand towel for ironing the sleeves. It is not absolutely required but it will make it much easier.

Ironing the Sleeves

1. Unbutton the shirt. It is important to open the shirt in order to iron it. For some shirts, you will find that they iron much easier when they are inside out. Experiment with flipping the shirt inside out to see if it improves the final look.
2. Read the label. Read the fabric content label and set the iron to match, err on the cool side. For cotton/poly blend use a polyester setting.
   • If your garment label does not forbid steam, use steam. It will make ironing much easier.
3. Lay the sleeve out on the board. With the rest of the shirt off to the side, lay out the sleeve on the ironing board. The cuff should be at the narrow end of the board. Lay it as flat as possible, button-side of the cuff down, and smooth it out by hand.
4. Align the seams. Starting with the seam on the underside of the sleeve (the one that leads into the armpit), flatten the sleeve from the point until another "seam" is created on the other side.
5. Spray the starch on the sleeve. Get some spray starch or sizing and spray it onto the whole sleeve, following the directions on the can.
6. Iron the sleeve. Iron the sleeve, starting from the shoulder and working down until about 3" from the beginning of the cuff. Be careful to avoid ironing over the buttons underneath.
   • If you want to avoid the seamed look, stop just short of the edges. Do a quarter turn on the sleeve before doing the other side and iron the new center to avoid wrinkles that you would have missed at the edge.
7. Iron the cuff. There are a number of different ways to do this. Because off the little gathers and pleats at the cuff of dress shirts, this can be a very difficult area to iron. How you do it will depend on how much effort you want to put in and how dramatic the gathers and pleats on the cuff are.
   • You can simply iron the bottom of the sleeve and the cuff in small sections, if you want to save time and don't care too much about how it looks. Spread the pleats and gathers by hand and iron
   • You can roll up the hand towel into a tight roll (toughly the same size as your wrist) and place it in the cuff. Iron with this in place to avoid much of the difficulty of ironing this area.
   • If the pleats and gathers are very badly wrinkled, ball up the hand towel and stuff in down the sleeve so that it fills out the area as much as possible. Use the steam function to ease most of the wrinkles and then iron it as much as you can.
8. Flip it over and iron the other side. This should be done in the exact same way as the first side, but should require less effort.

Ironing the Rest

1. Iron the collar. Iron the collar by flipping it up spraying with starch, and ironing the wrong side and then the right side. Finish by folding it desired position and ironing the crease.
2. Iron the rest of the shirt. Iron the rest of the shirt, moving from the front panel on one side to the front panel on the opposite side. The neck of the shirt should always be at the narrow end of the board.
   • Don't forget to spray the shirt with starch as you go!
3. Iron around the back pleats. There are often pleats at the top of the back of dress shirts. These can be tricky to iron if you've never done it before.
   • Begin by flattening out the pleat as much as possible, getting as close to the seam as you can. Iron all of this area flat.
   • Next, fold the pleat completely closed and touch just a bit of the end around the first inch or so from the seam, to reform the pleat.
4. Be careful around the buttons. When you iron around the buttons at the front of the shirt, it can be tricky. Just use the narrow point of the iron to work in between the buttons and remember not to iron on top of the buttons themselves.
   • Ironing this area from the underside first can make it much easier.

Tips

• Spray starch is inexpensive and helps give shirts a professional look.
• As soon as you're done ironing, hang the shirt up, buttoning the top button.
• Always rest the iron on its stand or end.

Warnings

• Keep cords away from small children, who could pull the iron onto themselves.
• Unplug the iron when you are through!

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See also

• Steam Press a Sweater or Other Knit Garment
• Make a Portable Ironing Board
• Clean the Bottom of an Iron
• Iron a Shirt
• Heat Press a T‐Shirt
• Use an Iron
• Starch a Shirt
• Iron a Suit Jacket
• Use a Clothes Steamer
• Choose the Right Ironing Board Cover

Read more ...