You know how some bloggers have little "challenges"? Like "eliminate all paper clutter!" And "throw away all plastic containers that have no lids!" Both good ideas, but I always figure who the hell has that kind of time? I have bigger fish to fry. And so maybe that's why I haven't cleaned my steam iron a single time since I bought it . . . oh, um . . . say, five years ago? And we would probably be going on six years had evil little brown spots not been appearing on some of my favorite spring clothes as I ironed. Not that I iron much. Clothes at least. I do iron the cloth dinner napkins we use. So I look like a big frump, but my table looks nice.Anywhoo, I finally downloaded the instructions for using the self-clean function (because I lost the ones that came with the iron) and got down to business. You put in water, heat it up to a bazillion degrees, hold it over the sink, and press the self-clean button. Steam and ghastly noises emit with great force.
Check out the crap that came out:
Nasty! What is this stuff??? Determined to have a clean iron, I repeated the process. Again and again and again.
Alrighty then. We're good again. It's back home on the little shelf Husband built it in the laundry room right next to the rocking fold-out ironing board he bought me. And if you can't believe I'm blogging about my steam iron, well neither can I.
8 comments:
I love that you iron! I don't even know where ours is.
Ewww! I have the same (or very similar) iron and it has never occurred to me that it needed to be cleaned. I'm kind of curious now to see how dirty it is!
zowie, i have had my iron for 12+ years and i have never cleaned it before. i don't use it often (twice a year? whenever we have to dress nicely) and now i'm curious to take a look. thanks for the educational post. i know you use flannel sheets year-round, but i thought of you the other day because we finally deemed it appropriate to switch out our flannels for the regular cotton because it's getting too hot for us (well, me). then again, it could be the hot flashes ;)
Oh Cindy! You have made me so happy to admit I do not iron! :) I would rather pay, um, $3/item at the dry cleaners! :)
I know those little brown spots quite well. See, if we all went to finishing school we would know to clean our irons at least once a year.
I'm pretty sure my iron instructions suggested cleaning it once a month.
Huh.
Maybe I should.
Do you know where your ironing board came from?? I'm looking for a "rocking fold-out" !
Oh you are better than me! I went through the same thing not so long ago but I only did it a few times and it still gave me icky brown spots on clothes (some of which have never come out!). So I just bought a new iron altogether. But it's pink so it's way more fun (you know- in terms of the scale for iron fun) than the regular white iron.
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