I have a wool suit that I bought for $25 at a thrift store. It’s in pretty good shape, but a bit wrinkly. Can I iron it out, or do I just need to go have it dry cleaned?
Steam is how you de-wrinkle things. Ironing is for getting creases in things.
You need steam. I would spray warm water on it with a spray bottle on mist and hang it in the shower with the water on its hottest setting… or have a dry cleaner ‘press it’… which means they steam it… and press/iron the pants if they need a crease.
I have a pair of wool pants that I occasionally run a steam iron over in between dry cleanings, but only in selected spots, i.e., really wrinkled areas like the crotch and the knees. If the whole pair were rumpled I would just take it to the cleaners.
Yeah, you shouldn’t need to get it fully dry-cleaned, just ‘steamed/pressed,’ which is cheaper.
(Though with a used suit a dry-cleaning might be wise…don’t know how it was cleaned beforehand…)
I’ve gotten my suit dry-cleaned by Greers on Dorset street a couple of times and it always came back perfect…even had a lot of mud on the pants that was removed. And it wasn’t expensive at all…I can’t remember off the top of my head, but I want to say around $10-$13 maybe? I suppose just a pressing would be less than $10.
The thrift store doesn’t abut a cemetary, does it?
If you ever do iron it (maybe not now, don’t iron it if steam from the shower does the trick), do it with the suit turned inside-out and iron the inside, with a cotton cloth between it and the iron. I find that wetting the cotton cloth works better than using only the iron’s steam. For a crease, turn them right-side-out but always, always use the cotton cloth: doing it this way avoids getting shiny spots.
I’ve never been able to get the hanging-in-the-shower technique to work. Most irons will have a lower heat setting for wool, which I think is intended to avoid making the suit shiny.
Having bought it for $25, it’s probably worth it to send it to the cleaners once, to get that dead-guy smell out of it. 
Even that wool setting sometimes makes the suit shiny (specially if they’re wool mix): seriously, cotton cloth for the win. At home we have separate rag bags for “all cotton” vs “anything else” specifically for ironing wool and wool-mix clothing. It’s one of the things that make my grandmother the seamstress laugh about having a granddaughter who’s a “professional ironer”. There’s been times I’ve re-ironed something we just got from the dry-cleaner’s :smack:
<Hijack> Thrift stores are leading causes of bed bug transfers. When you buy something from a thrift store, store it tight in a bag and wash it in hot water or put it in the dryer on high heat for an hour or get it dry cleaned. Both methods kill bed bugs and their eggs
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