Craft Tip: Ironing Board Covers

Here's one I learned the hard way...no teflon-coated cover!

Not too many crafters enjoy slaving over a hot iron, but we know that it is a necessary evil. For those of you that love to iron, Kudos to you! You probably already know what I found out the hard way.

Teflon-coated ironing board covers reflect heat, rather than letting steam pass through the fabric.

I have one of those wonderful steam presses that does a wonderful job for my purposes. However, I use a ton of iron on adhesive and sometimes it gets on the ironing surface, which means the next piece I iron sticks to the pressing surface and now has a sticky residue. Urgh. I hate that. So, I found a remnant at the local fabric store and made several covers so that I could interchange them: one for adhesive pressing, one for quilting, one for white fabric.

I didn't realize at first that my items weren't getting ironed as well as they used to until tried to press the fold out of a new yard of fabric. The fold just would not disappear. I finally worked around it, but it was bugging me. For a couple of weeks I worked around the problem. Finally came the day that I had to switch to the old cover that I had set aside for adhesive projects. I pressed the fold area of a new fabric with the old cover and guess what? The crease disappeared. Yup, the fabric that I used for the new cover was teflon coated and actually was advertised for ironing board covers.