I know there are people who love to iron. They love the mindlessness of the task and the look and feel of the clothes as they are ironing. Some people find it soothing. I’m not one of those people.
I only iron when I have nothing to wear, this happens rarely because I have lots of clothes that don’t need to be ironed. Usually by the time I get to the ironing basket I find clothes I’ve forgotten I own, or, and even sadder, they no longer fit.
Now that it’s summer and I’m hanging all my laundry out to dry pretty much everything needs to be ironed. Ugh. Not my idea of a good time.
It usually takes forever, I swear my clothes have the most stubborn wrinkles on the planet. I usually wind up squirting them down with water, ironing, squirting some more, ironing some more until I give up in frustration. This is not soothing!
I decided to try some tips I’ve heard to make ironing easier and faster. First, the padding on my ironing board cover was really thing, almost non existent. I took the cover off the ironing board, put a double layer of thin fleece on it, trimmed around it to make it fit. Then I took aluminum foil and covered the whole top of the new pad I made. Finally it was time to put the cover back on and iron.
I was amazed at how quickly everything seemed to iron. I really didn’t have to iron the back because the foil reflected the heat back up so I could iron both sides at once. The padding seemed to help as well, I could press a little harder.
I started thinking that for some reason my clothes were not very wrinkled. I got a pair of jeans that had been line dried and I didn’t even need to spray them with water.
While I may never look forward to ironing these few changes did make it go much faster so maybe I won’t dread it as much. Maybe I’ll even find it soothing… who am I kidding, that’s not going to happen!