My Iron Goes Rogue

Like most people, I'd imagine, I'd been happily walking around and thinking of my iron as having two basic settings: "On" and "Off."  Well, just recently I noticed that my iron now has three basic settings: "Not Plugged In," "Plugged In," and "Steam." 

We should back up. 

First of all, my iron is not even really my iron.  It was given to my husband by his mother well before he took up with a quilter.  He didn't believe me that it had been his when we were discussing the iron/possible demon possession (more on that in a moment), but that's because he probably never used it anyway. 

This is a good, hardworking iron and has served me faithfully through such events as The Great Fall off the Table of 2004, and the Orooni Learns Not to Use Well Water in the Iron Mess of 2010. 

There's no way for me to tell the rest of this story without looking like a weirdo, but meh, I'm okay with that - will be a nice change of pace from looking like a bumbling idiot.  So, my Ticker Tape quilt came out of the wash looking a bit more rumpled than I would've liked, and I decided to try to straighten it out a bit before hanging it up.  (It came out this way because I washed and dried it in a lingerie bag that was a bit too small for it because I was worried about threads coming off of the tapes and destroying my new-ish and beloved washer and dryer.) 

I plugged the iron in, then put the quilt face-down on the ironing board.  (Here's the weird part.)  Then, for some reason, I put the iron down on the quilt and pressed a bit.  When I lifted the iron off, the quilt was warm.  This was curious, because I hadn't turned the iron on yet.  Naturally, what you do in this situation is immediately touch the iron to see if it's hot.  (Whoops, looks like we're back to looking like a bumbling idiot.) 

And yes, the iron was hot! 

Given that one of my cardinal quilting rules is to never, ever iron batting or finished quilts, I think I must have been seeing if a cold iron would flatten the quilt out.  Otherwise, I have no idea why I was ironing - pretending to iron? - the quilt. 

Anyway, I burned my finger a bit and concluded that my iron was now inhabited by a ghost.  Or perhaps it was defying laws of physics in new and interesting ways and could be studied for Science.  I discovered that it wasn't hot enough to steam, so I turned it to "Steam" and steamed the quilt into a bit flatter state. 

Then I unplugged it and gave it the side-eye for the rest of the day.  When Other (significant) came home, I told him about the iron being hot despite being off.  He asked if I thought it was possessed, and I told him that it had been unplugged for a while, and that he should touch it to see if it was hot/possessed.  He did, and sadly there will be no scientific leaps based on my iron for now.  It's just broken.  

Now, if you're worried about me burning my house down with a broken iron, I don't blame you.  That does seem like the sort of stupid thing an Iron-Toucher would do.  However, you will be relieved to know that I've never trusted this iron anyway and am in the habit of leaving it unplugged. 

Habit will save us all!