A New Iron

My old iron died. Didn't get hot. Well, it never actually got hot, but now it wasn't even getting warm. It was doing a fine imitation of a paper weight. As luck would have it, the January issue of Threads magazine ran an article on irons and it convinced me that I needed to pay some major bucks for an iron that would do more than touch up collars and wristbands. The article talks about "heavy soleplates, narrow shapes, superior temerature dials and thermostats, and almost limitless steam capacity."

Armed with a 20% off coupon from Bed Bath and Beyond, I headed to the store. I chose the Rowenta Advancer. It's pricier than any other iron I've ever had but after using it for only half an hour I was convinced that it's worth it. With my old iron I had to work and work to get the wrinkles out of fabric that had been stuffed into boxes. Even spraying it with water and using steam, the results were never very good. The wrinkles still showed.

But with one swipe of this quite heavy iron with bunches of steam, the wrinkles are gone. Excellent!

Isn't it impressive? It has LED lights to indicate that it's warming up, cooling down, turning itself off, and ready to iron. After reading the manual (I always read the manual) I had to find a more powerful extension cord. This iron would likely overheat the cheap extension cord I had. And under Important Safety Instructions I learned that I should not direct steam at people or animals. And most importantly, I should not iron clothes while they are being worn. I wonder what bozo tried that. Rowenta probably got sued because somebody tried it and then claimed that it never said not to.

Yipes

It's been a long time, nearly a month since I posted. Time has surely slipped away but everybody knows what December is like. Thank heavens Christmas is over and I can go back to my regularly scheduled life.

So in amongst the Christmas cards, the shopping, the traveling, the baking, the shopping, the wrapping, and the general all around chaos, I have also been doing art. This first piece is what went on top of the background with the flung paint (I think I posted it sometime back in November, or maybe October...) It's called Sun Dance and measures about 50x50.


I really liked the process of making the background on Sun Dance and so did it again with reds. But on this piece I tried quilting the entire background in a small grid before adding the foreground pieces. I didn't do that on the first one and it made the quilting a little tricky.


So on this one I quilted the grid then showed it to friends for input. They all thought it was finished at that point. I thought about that for a while and disagreed. So I painted silk organza, layered on top, then quilted it in a larger grid pattern, then cut out in between some of the grid. Then added some more yellow and orange silk squares for interest. Now it's finished. This is called Downtown and measures about 43x50.


Here are details of both pieces.



In other news I received my copy of the Journal Quilt Project edited by Karen Bresenhan. My journal July is on page 213. I was very excited to see that it was given a full page treatment. You can buy one for your very own from Amazon.

And my first New Year's Resolution: to not let so much time pass between postings.