How NOT To Clean Your Iron

After seeing Melisa's post today about cleaning her iron, I decided I'd go ahead and post my iron cleaning experience.   I found this in my drafts folder from a few years ago.  This method is something I found on the internet several times and thought it was a good idea.   

This is a basket block that I worked on several months ago.  If you look closely at my block, you can see there is some brown staining on the white parts.  My iron has needed cleaning for quite awhile.  I'm sure I ironed over something that I shouldn't have.  It was really raining hard, so instead of going out to by something to clean the bottom of my iron, I turned to Google to see what others had done.  Now, I know not to believe everything that I read on the internet, so I normally look at the first 5 or 6 entries.  If they all say pretty much the same thing, I give it a try.



Most people said to make a paste of 2 tablespoons of baking soda to 1 tablespoon of water and apply to the bottom of the iron and let set.   Then wipe the bottom of the iron clean, and clean the holes of the iron out by adding water and setting the iron to steam.  And, it also said that if it didn't work the first time, to apply more and repeat.

It looked better, so I decided to repeat the process and let it sit on the bottom of the iron a little longer.





 You can see by looking at the iron that by this time we were both getting tired of this.  I guess I wandered away for awhile........I don't put water in my iron because as a rule it has always ended badly for me.  I just keep a spray bottle of water handy to use instead.  But the directions said to fill the iron with water and turn it to steam to finish cleaning the baking soda from the holes of the iron.




There's no photo for the next part of the process.   I wiped the iron clean after the second baking soda application, filled the iron with water and set it to steam.  I guess I had wandered away for way too long.  I didn't know that baking soda would burn.......  I started to smell something, and the baking soda had dried so hard in the holes of the iron that they started to burn.  The water wouldn't come out no matter what I did.  I was pretty disgusted, so I set the iron up on end.  And the brown water came pouring out of the bottom from a place where water shouldn't come out.  So that was the end of that iron. 

After this mess, I realized that I should have done this in the kitchen or bathroom near a sink instead of on my ironing board.  The iron board cover was now not only dirty, but it was soaking wet.  So I decided to pull it off and check the washing instructions.  What?  Blot spills up at once with a damp cloth.  Well, that ship had sailed.  I decided to just go ahead and throw it in the washer.  I'd already lost an iron.  What's one more thing?

I'm not sure why the instructions said not to machine wash, because the cover is as good as new.  The iron in the photo below is one I ordered awhile back as a travel iron, but it is almost a full size.  I was going to send it back to Amazon, but the cost of the return postage was more than the cost of the iron.  I'm glad I kept it for a spare.  

Hope you are finding some time to stitch today!