Cleaning folk dress after wet and muddy Song and Dance Festival takes skill
Like many previous festivals, last week's Estonian Song and Dance Festival in Tallinn was largely muddy, leaving singers' and dancers' folk dress in need of careful cleaning. While many performers care for their own folk dress, a small cleaner's just outside Tallinn has a professional who specializes in it.
Hansa Pesuteenused is located in a supermarket in Peetri. Its manager, Svetlana Saare, doesn't just have 25 years of experience caring for folk dress — she's even written a master's thesis on caring for heritage textiles.
In folk dress expert and enthusiast circles, she comes highly recommended.
"A customer called us straight from the Song Festival, saying they had a problem — their leather jacket had bled [onto their clothes]," Saare said. "Now we have to figure out how to get it clean."
She said that leather jackets are the hardest to deal with. "It's not even when embroidery bleeds — you can clean that," she explained. "But with leather, you have to use chemicals to get the color out."
The Song and Dance Festival Parade on Saturday and the Song Festival concerts that followed over the weekend saw plenty of rain.
This year's Dance Festival performers, however, were the lucky ones — Thursday and Friday brought dry weather for all three shows. The performances definitely worked up a sweat, but at least there was no mud flying around on the field.
Still, dancers have one persistent problem to deal with — pastlad, or traditional lace-up leather footwear.
"Our stockings got a bit dirty when dancing," said Arti Henri Lukk, a dancer with the Lee Dance Ensemble. "I think this time they'll have to be written off. The yellow color that comes from the pastlad — it's not so easy to get out."
"We haven't really had to wash our [folk] dress much," added Teele Toona, a fellow Lee dancer. "We typically take the weather into account, and wear appropriate clothing or lift our skirts higher."
Gall soap, dish soap
Toona noted that you can't exactly toss Estonian folk dress into a washing machine, but recommended gall soap — sapiseep in Estonian — for tackling stains. "Dish soap works too — for makeup stains," she added.
Some good general rules of thumb: don't wash linen or cotton shirts in hot water, and always treat stains first — more than once, if necessary. Keep in mind that any part of folk dress can bleed color.
Heavier wool garments, like coats and skirts, should be thoroughly dried before taking them to the cleaner's.
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Editor: Johanna Alvin, Aili Vahtla
