How Much Do You Love YOUR Iron?

I made a blue and orange quilt for a customer, which she picked up this week.  I’ll post more about it later this week.  It turned out quite lovely, I must say!

Because this is a customer quilt I’d planned to hand sew the binding; you may have heard me say in the past that I absolutely detest hand sewing so you’ll understand when I tell you I wasn’t looking forward to the task.  A quilter friend of mine hates adding borders so I traded her hand sewing my binding for adding her borders.  All in all not a bad trade, but I’m glad it’s now finished so I can take a break and work on my own projects.  I think I’m even going to be able to enter a quilt into the BBQ Quilt Show in September!  I haven’t made a quilt of my own for about 3 years, so this is quite exciting!

As I was finishing up the borders on my friend’s quilt yesterday, my iron turned itself off.   That’s the nature of the automatic shut-off so no biggie, right?  I jiggled and nothing happened.  Then I moved the cord around and the light slowly, and dimly, came back on, then the iron started working again perfectly.  Then it shut off again.  More jiggling with no results.  More cord moving with results.  I remembered that the cord near the base had felt pretty warm, even hot, earlier, too.  Uh oh!  I have a fire hazard on my hands!

I’ve had my iron, a Shark Professional model GI490, for about 7 years and I love it!  You can see that the finish on the handle is even starting to wear off.  How am I ever going to replace it?  I’ve seen all of the online requests asking for recommendations for an iron which I’ve blissfully ignored. 

I knew, of course, that because of the amount of time since the manufacture of my unit that I wouldn’t be able to purchase the same model again so I started my search on ConsumerReports.com. The reviews I found on the next model after it are terrible!  I was shocked and truly disappointed.  Eventually, though, I narrowed down my choices and went shopping.  Nothing beats an in-person inspection.  And you know what I came home with?  Another Shark! 

The Shark Ultimate Professional model GI505 is the next model up from the model with the bad reviews.  It looks and feels very similar to my old model so I suspect I’m going to really like it, all except the size of the top button that selects the temperature.  That’s the main button in the use of this iron so maybe I’ll get used to it and the size won’t bother me.

None of the other irons felt quite right, probably because I’ve used the same iron for over 7 years and have truly enjoyed it.  ConsumerReports.com has this model highly rated, although there are no reviews on it yet, but time will tell.