Cleaning a 1920’s beaded silk crepe wedding dress in a homemade outdoor bath

I did an unboxing video this past winter of this dress that was donated to me by a follower who was told it was worn for a 1924 wedding. I do think it's possible that this dress might be a little bit earlier and was worn twice and perhaps slightly modified to be worn again, but it is made out of a silk crepe over a silk satin and it has beading on it. And for these reasons, I was very nervous to take it on and I wanted to wait until spring to do a certain technique that the same follower also sent me a video of showing a way to do it on a frame that was done outside and I will show that in a bit. But first, before doing anything, I wanted to repair and reinforce that underarm before doing any soaking. So what the plan is, is I have a patio table outside and I wanted to make a wood frame that has lined in plastic to make a bath, so to speak. And I have my very handy mesh cupboard frame, PVC frame that I use on top of my bathtub, but that's too large to go inside my bathtub, and I wanted it to fit inside this frame. So I adjusted the wood and made it a little bit smaller and now it fits much better. And so in this, for this particular size isn't really the issue, but I was just trying to get it to fit that mesh cupboard frame that I have. And so the dimensions are given there. So to keep it, the plastic in place, I'm going to use some spring clamps. And here I forgot to take that mesh frame rack out first, but then I, then I remembered and then I grabbed it. So then I'm just laying that plastic down and actually the size of this worked out perfectly for a shower curtain size. Decided I should probably put some more clamps on there, so I added some more. But before I work on soaking the whole dress, I'm going to do a glycerin distilled water and vinegar mixture to try to work on just the two main front stains. That's really all I'm concerned with on this dress, and I'm not going to go really heavy duty on doing any kind of stain removal on it. And I've been told that this is a good solution for working on silk. And so, and I have tried it in the past. I've still not had a ton of success with it, but I'm just going to keep trying. So, so I can better see how it's working. I'm using a cotton cloth underneath and then also some cotton rounds and I put it, put it on its face side. So I'm working on the backside of it and I'm using a soft brush and just dabbing it on there, kind of working it in gently. And you can see a little bit of the Brown coming out, not a lot. So then I thought I'd step it up just a little bit and then take those cotton rounds that are soaked in that solution and kind of lay them on top there to kind of really let them work in and checked it again. You can see a little bit more coming out. And then I repeated the process using the brush to kind of work it in and try to soak in the solution. I put a cotton round at the bottom of it and another one on top just to kind of support it. Again, this whole time I'm nervous about this silk crepe. It's a very fine, sheer fabric. And I, with this age, I'm just not sure how it's going to fare with all these treatments. So far it seems to be handling it well. So I did bump it up a little bit and I tried some peroxide after doing a salt and vinegar, thinking it might be rust. The peroxide didn't do anything. But with each of these, I'm not doing probably more than 10 or 15 minutes on each one because of being nervous about it just going too far. So perhaps if I'd done the baking soda and let it set quite a bit longer, it might have done a better job. But I'm just calling it good. I don't want to, so far I've gotten through this without crossing any holes. So I'm just going to move on. So now is the time to come to the soaking part of it. So using this as the little bath, I'm using distilled water. I had like, it was close to five gallons, I believe. And I'm quickly realizing that isn't going to be near enough. So I took one of the empty jugs and added a capful of Dirty Labs detergent in there, shook it up with some water, and then I poured that gallon all over the dress. So that soapy solution is working its way on the dress. And then I took my garden hose on the shower setting, and then I just worked it over the whole course of the dress, just little by little kind of working it in. And I have to say, doing this outside on this kind of frame with this little bath, it was actually nice to be able to not be bent over a tub and to kind of see the whole garment so it's not kind of bunched up or balled up in a tub as it normally is. And so it was just really nice to be able to do that. And I had my son help me lift it up out of the water on another mesh rack going the opposite direction to raise it out of the water. And I did see some yellow coming out of that water, so I know the dress has gotten cleaner. And so here's just kind of showing the rinsing process. So to do this again, I would empty out all the water first before doing the rinsing. And then I gently arranged it, and I wanted it to keep drip drying. So then I covered it with my fabric sling to protect it from bugs and leaves, and did my towel roll, and that allowed me to safely transport it inside. And then I put the mesh rack on top of the bathtub, let it dry, and just last bit to finish air drying on the mannequin. So now to work on the upper bodice. Originally, I'm sure the dress had an underdress, and that upper sheer bodice would have been, it would have, you know, it wouldn't have been revealing. So as found, the dress had a rather large tuck. So again, this does lead me to believe that perhaps it was shortened for another bride to wear. So I was able to remove that tuck and use that fabric. So I kind of encased that seam in some lace, cut that piece out, pressed it, and then neatened up the edges. And then I was able to use that as a band to go on the top that you'll see here shortly. So I'm pressing under the top edge. I've got a new needle for the sewing machine because this is a nice, fine type of a silk satin fabric. And then now I'm folding it back over and then top stitching it onto the bodice top. And that also allowed me to repair that huge underarm seam. So there you see how it looked before. And I just continued the satin over that hole. And the waist sash also, from whomever did the original alteration, it wasn't quite fitted right and it kind of laid in a wrong section of the dress. I think it was meant to move over a little bit because of that alteration that they did. So I decided to replace or remove it. And then I thought it would be kind of fun just to add a little bit of beaded trim or a fringe trim to it. And so to do that, you just start with one single bead on one single strand of thread. Then you bring the two pieces of thread together and string them so that you're doing the rest of the beads on the double strand. And then here attaching it, I'm catching that close topmost bead to reinforce it. And that's how that turned out. So now to refresh the veil. This is what I believe is a silk net as well. The very top panels of it were really quite damaged. And I knew just soaking it without reinforcing it, it would continue to fall apart. The rest of the veil itself was in good shape and I did not want to mess with that. So I'm just kind of doing a reinforcing layer on the inside and then turned it right side out. And then I'm using a fabric sling in a little tub. And I actually did the other veil at the same time too. And you can see there that they needed to be cleaned and let it air dry. Did a quick press. And this just is the most beautiful fabric. It's just soft and light as a feather. And there are still, of course, the holes in the upper part on top of the head. But the rest of the veil, I'm really quite pleased how well that cleaned up. And here is the befores of the stains in the front, which is where this all started. So my solution for that, for putting the beading over the stains there, I think worked quite well. I feel like if you didn't know any better, you'd think that those were there from the beginning. So I learned so many things from doing this process. I was afraid to do this. I was afraid it was going to fall apart. And I knew that if I didn't try, I was going to, I just, how do you know until you try? And I got a little more confident as I went on. I'm really happy with how this turned out. And once again, this dress, over 100 years later, is now clean and wearable once again.