Studio, tierneycreates

Saved by the Internet

tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

A friend of mine and I have an ongoing joke that we are going to write a book called “An Idiot’s Guide to Being an Idiot”. Over the years we have shared and collected humorous mistakes, miniature disasters and cosmic foibles.

Today I created a new chapter in our imaginary book. The chapter would be titled “How to screw up your iron when you really need it work”.

In addition to handmade items on my tierneycreates Etsy shop I also sell some carefully curated fabric (fabric I want to use but needed an excuse to buy the entire bolt…hey – I can share it with my customers!).

I created a fat quarter set from the collection of the solid color Peppered Cotton (“shot cotton”)  yardage that I sell.

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The fat quarter packs have been a great seller, and yesterday I sold another set and today I needed to prepare it to send to my customer. However, what I did not realize was that I was one set short and needed to cut new  fat quarter sets.

Luckily, I recently replaced some of the yardage/bolts I ran out of (the blue, grey, green and tan were very popular). So I needed to open new bolts wrapped in plastic and cut some yardage into fat quarters (18″ x 22″ sections of fabric).

Trying to work efficiently, I warmed up the iron and put it on the floor in the corner so it would be ready for me to nicely iron each fat quarter before packaging them into sets.

The new bolts were wrapped in plastic and here is where my complete “Idiot Moment” began – I accidentally threw the plastic covers for the new bolts on top of the hot iron on the floor.

Are you ready for a huge life lesson (this will be life changing, hold onto your seats):

HOT IRONS AND PLASTIC ARE NOT FRIENDS. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO MAKE THEM FRIENDS. KEEP IRONS AND PLASTIC SEPARATE AND AS FAR AWAY FROM EACH OTHER AS POSSIBLE. 

So here I am needing to package up a fat quarter set to mail to an Etsy customer and my iron is now completely out of commission.

I yelled down the hall to “Terry the Quilting Husband”, and he immediately ran in (as he thought perhaps I had sewn through my hand or had rotary cut off several fingers by the way I screamed for help) and we began to troubleshoot the disaster.

I will not review the painfully ineffective steps we tried. Then I thought: it is likely that someone else has made such a silly mistake in the past and maybe there is something on the internet about how they fixed it.

Yes the internet came through for me. A brief search revealed many tips on how to remove plastic from irons (there must be whole communities of people accidentally melting plastic on their irons everyday!). We thought this one was the best resource on removing plastic from the doityourself.com website:

How to Remove Melted Plastic from a Clothes Iron

We are now at the step of placing the plate of iron in ice water (yes, of course we unplugged the iron first, we do not want to create an additional chapter to the “Idiot’s Guide”, ha!) after scraping off the plastic with a metal spatula. Wish me luck. I must now return to my disaster..

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Postscript

It worked! (HAPPY DANCE). I am now ironing the fat quarters and making them into bundles.

While working on these fat quarter sets/bundles I remembered I had posted about my adventures in starting to sell fabric in 2015 in this post: Adventures in Retail. If you read that post you will wonder why I am still making up these fat quarter sets. The answer is I love this fabric and I am happy to share it at a reasonable price with  my fellow crafters out there (so I can justify buying more bolts of it…).

Published by tierneycreates: a fusion of textiles and smiles

Quilter, crafter, obsessive tea drinker and lover of all furry creatures (especially dogs and cats) - join me on my tierneycreates blog as I share stories from "A Crafter's Life".

18 thoughts on “Saved by the Internet”

  3. An iron in reserve! Two thoughts about keeping a spare iron, just in case. 1) in 2010 my iron crapped out on me. Quit. I was teaching summer school (MBA class, in a city 2 hours away, from 5pm to 9:30…) And my iron quit at a bad moment. And when I got back in town that night, after midnight (hey, that’s a song…) I was sooooooo tempted to stop at Walmart to buy a new iron. 2) in about, oh, 2005, I bought a hair dryer. Just in case. My old one was old, and if IT crapped out on me, going to work in the morning would be an adventure I didn’t want to consider. I still have the NEW hair dryer. In the box.

    Obviously, having a spare means you will never need it. 😉

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  4. Ouch — I’m glad you recovered enough to do the job at hand. I once turned on my oven to cook dinner. Unfortunately I forgot that I was storing a lot of Tupperware inside. The nice gentlemen at the fire department had a good laugh.

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      1. Melanie — I’m so happy to learn that I’m not the only one! My neighbor’s name is Linda, but her family calls her “Burnie” because of all of the kitchen fire’s she’s presided over. LOL!

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    1. Lol! You seriously do not want us creating any more content for the book – ha! We might have broken too many bones, etc. for our Idiot Adventures to be able to sign the book copies 😉

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      2. Of course reading through some of these comments, maybe you should just collect all the stories! LOL. I’m sure I have some I could contribute too–although not necessarily about irons and fires.

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