Loading ...
I can’t believe I screwed this up.
After seven years of having the love of my life offer to iron my clothing, and my letting her, on a recent morning, on the oddness of my having to wear a suit, and with said suit a dress shirt, I started one of our morning conversations with “I think I’m going to…” She knew I had a meeting, she knew I needed a dress shirt, she cut me off and said, “Iron your shirt?” “The shirt’s fine,” I said, “and besides, I’ll be wearing a suit coat over it.” She insisted on inspecting my shirt, she decided it needed to be ironed (I still insist it was fine), and she ever so calmly nudged me to give ironing a try.
And here’s where I screwed up.
I was in my forties when we re-connected, fell in love, and got married. In those earlier years when I was on my own I will admit that I have done some ironing, and although it wasn’t the greatest, it did the trick when that “wrinkle-free” shirt wasn’t so “wrinkle-free.” To keep our morning cordial, and not say something completely insane like, “Look, woman, you’re the woman. Iron my damn shirt!”, I decided to take my dress shirt to the ironing board, did my best to pretend I didn’t really know how to work our iron, kept mumbling how it would be her fault if I ruined my shirt, but then habit took over, and I ironed my shirt. Yup, most of the wrinkles were gone, I didn’t have any horrible creases, she again asked to inspect the shirt, let me know it was fine, and hinted that my days of her ironing my shirts were over.
Crap.
What in the hell was I thinking? I could have easily burnt a part of my shirt. I could have easily creased the bejesus out of the shirt, held it up, and said, “How’s this?”, thereby having her shake her head in wonder, take my creased shirt from me, and proceed to properly iron it, but no, I did a pretty decent ironing job thus securing, for the most part, any time I say “Honey, can you iron my shirt?”, a reply of “You do a pretty good job. I think the practice will be good for you.” My wife is good like that, giving me a “challenge” to get better, but I’ll never be as good as she is at ironing, nor as speedy, though I have a feeling I’ll be getting more practice.
I’d love to give some instruction to other dudes, or dudettes for that matter, on proper ironing technique, but in the end my process is to plug in the iron, turn it on, put it on a setting that I think matches the clothing, wait a little bit for the iron to get hot, put the wrinkled area over the center of the ironing board, rub the iron over the area with the wrinkles, make a crease worse than the wrinkles, say “Shit,” move shirt a little so the creased area is now center, rub the area over the crease, flatten crease but make a new crease a little further along, say “Shit,” and continue moving the clothing until hopefully the last crease is actually where the crease should be on my shirt or pants. My better technique – pay more attention when I’m buying clothes to make sure they are wrinkle free.
My other advice – If your significant other has been ironing your clothing and they give you the challenge of doing it yourself, be sure you totally screw it up. Unfortunately I kind of knew how to iron my clothes in the first place, but I wonder: Do you know how to iron your clothes?
That’s it for this one! L8R!!