Iron Cleaner Hack

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BEST IRON CLEANING HACK, EVER!

I’m a sewer, embroiderer, quilter, digital cutter and all around enthusiast when it comes to crafting of any kind. This means I have lots of stuff a.k.a. notions. One notion that I use on a daily basis for all of my crafting hobbies is an iron. My two favorite irons are these:

• Laura Star Iron
• Oliso Iron

So what do all my irons have in common? They accumulate lots of junk on the soleplate. I use a lot of Foolproof Fusible Webbing for machine applique and if I’m not careful some of it winds up on my iron.

HACK REVEALED

Magic Eraser

How To Execute The Hack:  

Use on a warm-hot iron. Wet the Magic Eraser and wring out the excess water. Place the eraser on an ironing surface and run the iron over the eraser several times until no more residue is left on the soleplate.

Now for a WHAT NOT TO DO story. This is an actual story that my friend Kim can attest to its reality.

We had been in the office making 200 kits that involved fusing 12×12 pieces batting to fabric. Can you imagine what our irons looked like mid-way through? I used my handy-dandy Magic Eraser hack and it worked marginally. So being me, I thought I had a brilliant idea. I mean brilliant like the light bulb was dinging and the music was playing. Ok, maybe there was no music but I still thought it was a great idea. Turns out it wasn’t, not by a long shot. My idea was to use cream iron cleaner you find at fabric stores and combine that with my Magic Eraser trick. I squeezed the tube of cleaner onto the wet eraser and ran the iron over the wet surface. I have to say it worked beautifully. The irons were clean in a few minutes and I was feeling like “all that and a bag of chips“…until the fire alarm in my commercial building went off and the doors suddenly flew open to my neighbors, and their neighbors, and their neighbors offices. Talk about embarrassing. The fire truck came and I explained that I was just cleaning my irons and was so sorry to bring them all the way down to my humble establishment. Luckily for me one of the firemen’s wife was a quilter and as he walked in and saw all of our sewing equipment he just laughed and said don’t worry about it. Saved by the quilter.