In the early 1950’s Mr. C from Chalfont St. Giles, married the love of his life, his wife looked stunning on that very special day, in her beautiful white lace Wedding gown. Things were tough in those days, and cleaning the gown was way down the list of priorities, the gown was wrapped in brown paper and put to the back of the wardrobe. Sadly in 2005 Mrs. C passed away, and when Mr. C was going through her clothes he re-found that wedding gown and, He decided that he would like to have the gown cleaned and restored, to be able to show to his children and grandchildren just how beautiful their Mother and Grandmother (who had only seen photographs) had looked all those years ago. He took the gown to several Dry Cleaners in the Greater London Area, but no-one would clean the by now fragile gown, eventually he tried a local Dress shop who were so touched by his desire to have the gown restored that they searched the internet, and came across Carlton Cleaners.
When they contacted us we asked them to send us the Gown, and we would have a look to see if anything could be done, if not we would return it at our expense. The Gown arrived complete with the old photographs, and was in a sorry state, the body of the gown having yellowed with age, what had been little crocheted red roses had either lost their colour or had disappeared, and the hem was torn. We decided that we would like to do whatever we could, so we very carefully treated then cleaned the gown in Virgin Solvent, and the yellowing disappeared leaving behind a few protein stains, these we treated with post spotting chemicals to remove them. After cleaning we got our tailor to resew the hem, and on a market stall we managed to find some similar crocheted Red Roses.
The gown was then put into an acid free wedding gown box and packed with acid free tissue. Rather than trust this to the post, we drove the 190 miles and hand delivered the garment to the gentleman in question. The look on Mr. C’s face as the memories came flooding back more than made up for the efforts that we had gone to, and furthermore we did not charge him.