I'm Just Talkin' About... Ironing

Pressing cloth smooth (http://www.oldandinteresting.com/antique-irons-smoothers-mangles.aspx) has been an activity of humans all over the world for a very long time. Over the years cloth pressing instruments have gone through many different forms to get to what we use today.

 

When I was a kid ironing was an event that happened alot at my house.  My mom took in ironing to earn a few extra dollars for the household (does anyone still IRON for money other than a dry cleaning company?).  She would sprinkle water on each item,  roll each piece up in a tight little roll and then wrap it all together in a bath towel.  It would sit that way for awhile, maybe even overnight, until she ironed it.  Bet she would have liked a steam iron!

 

Do you iron anything?  I do, more than I wished.  I think it's one of those mothers curses my mother left me!  I iron my husbands jeans, Dockers, polo shirts & button-up shirts.  He likes cotton, none of this permanent press no iron stuff for him!  I must admit I also prefer cotton and can't bring myself to wear something wrinkled (I'm convinced this is also a mothers curse). I also iron things like pillowcases.

 

 

How often do you replace your ironing board cover and iron?  Needless to say because of this CURSE to IRON I'm kinda hard on an ironing board and iron.  The surface of the ironing board cover becomes scorched, stained and torn.  Recently while ironing a piece of white fabric (Oh Yeah, I iron a LOT of fabric too) the fabric picked up the dark discoloration caused by scorching. Grrr....  It was time for a new cover!  I seem to replace a cover every 3-5 years and irons vary.

  

Do you have a particular brand of iron or cover you prefer?   I always buy Rowenta brand irons which used to last me about the same length of time as the cover but lately it seem like I've had to replace them every year or two.  This doesn't make my checkbook happy ( that word 'checkbook' probably dates me, huh?) I've tried some different kinds f ironing board covers that promise to make the job easier because they reflect the heat up to fabric.  I find they also reflect heat to fingers and I end up with burns on them,  OUCH!  This time I just visited my local Target store and was successful in my mission to NOT spend a LOT of MONEY.  I snagged a whimsical polka dot cover on the clearance rack (8 bucks!)
 

 

 

Are you old school?  And then there's board clips.  Back in the day an ironing person had to use board clips (another term that dates me) to keep the cover on the ironing board.  Then they started making covers with a draw string, I didn't find they worked very good so I continued to use clips.  These days they make covers with an elastic band.  Now... being old school when I approached the task of replacing my cover I also went searching for new clips since mine were worn out.  But I couldn't find them in any store.  So went to Amazon (they have everything and it usually arrives next day!) 

So now I'm ready for another couple years of that dreaded chore.... IRONING.

 

 

 

 

  

I'm Just Talkin' About... NATURE

Yesterday my day was spent with NATURE, in the form of ANTS.  There were hundreds, if not thousands of the little tenacious crawlers invading my house!  This wild adventure actually started the night before as I crawled into bed I noticed an innocent little ant between the sheets.  Silly me… I thought it got there as a stow away on the cord of my heating pad (is that too much info?)  A nearby window had been open during the day and I rationalized its presence by thinking it had wandered through the window and found its way onto the cord that I then put on the bed.  I mean really, how else could it have gotten there?

The next morning I wandered down the hall towards the coffee and almost reached my destination before I realized my walk, almost the entire length of the house, had been in a trail of ants!  The trail started in the dining room at the cat’s food bowl and it led the colony down the hall to an area rug.  I get the invasion of the food bowl but don’t get the area rug.  ???

So in an attempt to GET RID of them I started with some wet paper towels.  Paper towels… not much of a weapon.  But my thought was, “I’ll just wipe them up.”  Yeah, not so much, there were WAY too many for that tactic.  My next logical thought was, “I need to do a MASS killing!”  Under the kitchen sink there was a bottle of Lysol Disinfectant Spray (now that’s a WOMANS tool).  It worked wonders as I sprayed it on the trail of invaders.   Then those wet paper towels came in handy for the removal of all those little DEAD ants.

It sounds like everything is under control, RIGHT?  But the more I got rid of the more I found!  They were not only in the dining room and down the hall; they were also in the KITCHEN and TWO bedrooms and BOTH bathrooms.  I did switch my paper towels in for Lysol Disinfecting Wipes (I use these things for EVERYTHING).  My thought was the disinfectant (what ever that STUFF is) would kill the pheromones they were leaving behind and they would think the trail was NOT in my house making them go back to where ever they came from.  I learned that without a trail they just run around EVERYWHERE looking for it!  So now most of these guys (or gals) were not as organized as the first invaders cuz they didn’t have the TRAIL thing going on.  Which meant the remainder of my day was spent killing them ONE ant at a time.  ALL DAY long I was KILLING ANTS!  Every time I entered a room I saw little ants running around aimlessly!  At 10:30 last night I was still killing ANTS (in the bathroom)!

This morning… I woke up to the cat (no I’m not changing the subject) on my bed playing with something.  Yep!  It was an ant, running around in my bed!  Once on my feet I saw all her little friends running around in my bedroom and bathroom AND more making their way across the hall into another bedroom!  So, here I go again… Killing ants… ONE little ant at a time…