Where has the first part of March gone? Oh, that’s right. I’ve spent it in front of the sewing machine. Maybe that’s why my back hurts, the household has reverted to a state of savagery, and I can’t locate clean laundry.

It’s at times like this that I find fictional descriptions of the Middle Ages attractive: rushes on the floors, everyone eating off trenchers with their bare hands, and great slathering Irish Wolfhounds wandering around cleaning up any food messes which occur. No toilets to clean, either, and if that leads to some health issues, what’s a little plague between friends? It all sounds marvelously efficient. Less to clean and all of that. I’ll bet one reason Leonardo got things done is that he didn’t waste time scrubbing the grout in his shower.

Anyhow, while I’m not on the topic, about a year ago I started a series of mostly black-and-white pieces with fairly dense stitching. As in, lines of stitching that are maybe 1/32 – 1/16″ apart, like this:

Gosh, these are time consuming. Each time I do one, I swear that’ll be the last … then I get another idea and crank into production again. Right now I have two going, one in the machine and one in the Closet of Banishment. (The Closet of Banishment being where I send pieces which have been painted but not stitched, so that I don’t have to think about them for awhile..)

This is the one which is presently in the Closet of Banishment. Working title: Creepy Boy.

Alas, I can’t show a photo of the work which is in the machine. Right now the stitching has distorted it so badly that it lays like a topographical map of the Sierras. However, if I can manage to steam it into submission so that it lays flat, I might submit it to a show, and some shows get miffed if pieces have appeared on websites and the like.

Unfortunately, steaming it will require purchasing a new iron. (Recommendations welcomed.) While I was making a hanging sleeve for another piece, my old iron, the one I’d used for 25 years, croaked. Out of desperation, I resorted to using my husband’s bachelor iron, which was of a similar vintage. Its sole plate looked a little grotty – maybe he occasionally ironed electrical tape with it during his bachelor days? – so I scrubbed it off.

Imagine my surprise when I fired it up and chunks of black and white gunk started erupting from the steam holes! Some of them appeared to be mineral deposits; the rest had an unknown provenance. When I tried to brush them away, they stained the fabric I was pressing, a nice chunk of pristine white cotton. I gently nudged the areas with a fingernail. Much to my horror, holes appeared in the cotton!

As near as I can figure, the chunks which came out of the iron were either highly basic or highly acidic. When combined with the steam from the iron, they must have gone into solution, then ate holes in my fabric. The good news is that this happened on a hanging sleeve, not a piece I was working on.

Lessons learned: always test the iron on a scrap of fabric, and never, ever use a piece of equipment from my husband’s bachelor days on anything that matters. (He’s a wonderful man, but I suspect that he was a bit feral before we married.) Evidently some of the mineral deposits which accumulate in irons aren’t harmless.

Did I mention that my back hurts?