When you start getting good at cleaning upholstered furniture you can expect a certain phone call. “Hey, my kid running their toy over my silk velvet sofa was leaving cool lines and now they won’t come out!” Fixing velvet furniture, or the ‘nap’ on it can be scary and expensive if you are inexperienced. Take some of these tips with a handful of caution if you are going to take this on yourself. Otherwise, call a professional like us to safely correct any nap issue you may have.
When the nap gets messed with on some of these pieces, it can be an ugly thing. In the case of the image to the left, someone got a touch aggressive with the vacuum nozzle. If you look really close, you can see where they swiped up and down trying to remove that dry soil like it called them a dirty name. While I, the professional cleaner, love the motivation, you might want to ease up a bit on more delicate furniture.
Synthetic materials such as microfiber can be stood up and laid down easily. As a matter of fact, most folks like the look of an up and down sweeping pattern. The problem is this is no synthetic microfiber. This is a much more expensive piece of silk velvet. This is the type of furniture you buy to look at and never…EVER…use. Hopefully, if you have purchased something like this, you understand this. Otherwise, I become the bad guy that tells you the dog probably shouldn’t be laying on it while chewing his bones (this has actually happened to me).
Now, if you look to the right (up a bit too, I suppose) you can see how much we were able to correct. How did we do it? “I WAS PROMISED TIPS DAG NABBIT!!!”. Well, in this case, we steamed it. I cannot stress enough how much you should not attempt this though. Some silks flat out do not like water or heat. In these cases even the smallest drop from your steamer can be a bad day.
