Having worn and worked a lot with linen in the last few years, I have learnt quite a lot about how to handle it. No doubt I will go on learning and the pearls of wisdom I am dispensing here might be superseded down the track. But for now, this is what I think I know.
First of all, the heavier weight linens crease less than the lighter weights. The light, airy linen I like to wear in hot weather crease the most. Boo!
Nevertheless I work mostly with light weight linen, not only because I like to wear it, but also because it is the only type cheap enough to allow me to experiment with my painting, without having an anxiety attack every time dye touches fabric. Consequently I am always searching for that silver bullet that does away with having to iron my creations.
The bad news is that there is no silver bullet that gives you that crisply ironed unwrinkled look, so beloved by fashion retailers on and offline, without — ironing. The further bad news is that when you iron, you create a hard surface on your linen fabric. While that looks lovely and even sometimes produces a subtle lustre that is hard to beat, unfortunately this hard surface creases like mad and the creases pretty much stay there. Like paper, once you crease it, the creases won’t come out again and on plain linen they are very obvious.
There is good news however. Linen softens with washing and if you don’t create a hard surface with your iron it will rumple but wrinkle much less. Of course there is the issue of how much wrinkling you start with when you first pull the freshly washed garment over your head, and that depends on how much you create in the washing and drying process.
Spinning your linen garment at a gazillion rpm will create a gazillion set-in wrinkles. Tumble drying may help a bit, but unless your drying appliance is of the miraculous kind, it is unlikely to fix all the damage done in the washing machine. The best way I have found is to spin as little as you can and hang up your garment dripping wet, shaking it out sharply (think wet dog) and pulling and straightening the seams and hems as best you can.
When this dries your garment will look quite smooth. If you look very closely, you will see a softly rumpled surface on your linen.
The linen will bend with your movements as you wear it, but not crease sharply like paper. These ‘bends’ in the fabric will be much less visible and will drop out quite a lot with gravity and your body’s warmth and moisture, keeping the garment much as it looked when you first put it on. However, in areas like elbows and knees, especially if the garment is tight there, you will still get sharp creases whether you like it or not.
It has to be said that this process works better with some types of garments than others. Loose, simple styles such as beach pants, t-shirt style boxy tops and tunics or casual dresses with minimal seams and no closures are best suited. With a button up shirt on the other hand, everyone is used to seeing them crisply ironed, especially the collars. Un-ironed it will look wilted and untidy, and as for tailored pant suits or jackets, forget it. Dry cleaning and letting someone else do the ironing is your best bet there.
The upshot is that an ironed linen garment will look better than an un-ironed one for the first couple of hours of wear. After that it will continue to look worse and worse, while the un-ironed garment will hold its own and can be worn until it next needs washing without deteriorating much at all. The softer the linen is after washing the less it will wrinkle.
Linen will soften naturally with washing over time, but I have found that there are things that can be done to speed this process considerably. Manufacturers do exotic stuff like enzyme treatments, but for a lay person, soaking it in washing soda or especially the stronger version of this, soda ash, works wonders. I tend to soak my linen in a mix of half a cup of soda ash (swimming pool supplies section of your hardware store) to 4 litres of water, for a few minutes, then hang this to dry and leave the chemical in the fabric for 1-2 weeks. You need to wash this out if you want to iron, as soda ash will go brown with the heat. (Not to worry if this happens, the discolouration will wash out completely.) Or you could theoretically leave the linen in the soda ash solution for an extended period, but go easy. I need to dry the soaked fabric for my dye painting and therefore have no experience with leaving it wet in the solution. Theoretically it should be fine, but I haven’t tried it.
If this chemical treatment is too radical for your taste, Sandra Bettina recommends putting linen several times through a very hot wash and tumble dry before sewing. This will get rid of any shrinking (not a problem for me with my taste for oversize), but it also softens the fibres, which I suspect produces a similar effect to a treatment with soda ash.
If you are into dyeing or dye painting you will be pleased to know that fibre-reactive dyes soften the linen up further, especially if you leave the dye to cure wet or damp for 8 hours or overnight.
Block printing or stencilling with screen printing ink will not soften linen, but sort of stabilise the fabric a little and make it resist wrinkling. The printed/stencilled motifs also draw visual attention, dominating any wrinkles or rumples that might be there.
The Insouciant Stitcher 