dry cleaners

I am very careful with dry cleaners - the fabric gets damaged by the chemicals. I use them occasionally, and I always use a local one, who cleans on the premises so I can discuss the cleaning with them. I make my own clothes, and am very fussy!

Firstly - spot clean and 'air' clothes instead of dry cleaning or washing. I have a couple of bamboo'silk' T shirts that I wear under shirts, so thy don't get sweaty. That way you don't need to clean the shirts every time you wear them.

I do dry clean my very good clothes when needed, but they then get relegated to 'not worth it, try washing' and most of them come up beautifully - if they don't, no loss.

However, because of all of this, I don't mind paying for good dry cleaning when needed.

I used to dry-clean everything woollen/wintry.
When husband was working he had four good quality work suits which we rotated through the dry-cleaners monthly.
With what you pay now, you could buy a new suit after a few dry-clean sessions !
I make do with gentle machine wash where possible and find most things come out well.
Lucky we don't have to worry about smart work clothes any more.

Whilst I try to avoid buying .dry clean only clothes, I did discover years ago that you can wash them safely by hand. I’ve never had one go wrong and think the labels are often there for the manufacturers own protection. My thinking always is that even if it goes wrong, it’s no loss as I wouldn’t wear it anyway if it needed dry cleaning - if that makes sense

Since DH has retired, we don’t use the dry cleaners. I had noticed how expensive it had become, as our local Waitrose takes in dry cleaning, at the Customer advice desk, and the price list is on display.
I seem to remember, quite a while ago, that you could buy sheets for ‘dry cleaning’ that you placed in a tumble dryer, but haven’t seen them recently.

The garments marked dry-clean only I've ignored for years and wash perfectly well, probably better/cleaner than the white spirit that's used in dry-cleaners. Jackets too wash fine.

Larger items such as thick/quilted bedspreads my D drops off at the launderette, once a year for the Winter weight and once during the summer for the white thick candlewick------neither fit in my machine. It would probably cost me £50 if I had both dry-cleaned.