has been showing a collection of old irons from a heritage collection she is working with, and a couple of comments have been made on how dangerous they must have been to use -
which brings me to my tale -
I inherited my mum's belongings and started using her old Sunbeam iron as a spare in my sewing room.
I'd been making log cabins, so it involved sew a line, turn and press, sew another line etc, so I had left the iron turned on in the corner of the room.
Unknown to me the thermostat on the old iron must have become stuck and it kept on heating and heating (unnoticed) until the by now glowing red sole plate of the iron cracked in half with an almighty "bang" and landed on the wooden floor, so hot it skidded across the floor and against a cardboard box of material, leaving little red pieces of shrapnel burning into the floor in its wake.
Luckily I had a pair of long handled forceps that I use to stuff doll limbs and I grabbed the largest glowing piece of iron and rushed it to the shower recess, then back with bucket of water for the other bits.
It's so lucky I was in the room at the moment it went - I have horrors thinking of the number of times I've left the iron on and wandered off to make coffee and sometimes even forgotten to turn it off overnight.
So the moral of the story - well, I don't need to tell you -
and I still have the burn marks to remind me -
Everyone wants to know why we didn't have the floor sanded and refinished - I think my DH is waiting to see what else I do -
our pine kitchen table is supporting a burn hole from my first attempts to make glass beads - pine burns really well with molten glass!
