Iron Caddy

Yesterday I finished my iron caddy that I started in January.  That was the month I bought a great travel iron to take to a quilting retreat.  When I found out that irons and ironing boards were provided, I stopped working on the iron caddy.  I got tired of seeing this unfinished project cluttering up the end of my sewing table, so I made myself finish it before working on anything new.

The Painted Quilt has a link that downloads a free pattern and instructions, which actually get downloaded from the Tri-County Quilters' website.  The Painted Quilt has pictures and a blog post about the iron caddy.  Tri-County Quilters merely has a link to the iron caddy pdf file on their Supply List page.  In the interest of complete disclosure and full credit, I wanted to mention both.

I also found this video from Pattern Pile to be very helpful, especially for the button and closure placement.

Of course I needed to pick fabric that coordinated with my iron.

When I started the project in January, I thought I had only a short time to finish it.  I already had the outer material, and wanted an "instant" handle and binding, so I used the yellow webbing and brown bias tape that was in my stash.  

You see those two buttons on top of the binding?  They were my first choice, but I wound up going with different ones.  For the elastic closure, I followed the advice of The Painted Quilt and used ponytail elastic that I bought at a dollar store.

The only other things I had to buy were the silver ironing board fabric and Insul-Bright.  The last time I used Insul-Bright, I couldn't tell one side from the other, which was a problem because the directions said to place the shiny side toward the object you want to insulate.  See photo on left.

With the new Insul-Bright (photo on right), the shiny side is clearly visible.  But now the instructions say it doesn't matter which side goes where.  Huh?  That's illogical to me.  I made sure I laid the shiny side toward where my iron is going to be.

I'm not going to show you how to make the iron caddy - see the links I posted above.  But here's what the paper pattern looks like after stitching through all the layers, which were pretty thick.  If I make another caddy, which I don't think I'll ever do, I'll mark the lines on the fabric instead of making a paper pattern.

These iron caddys have a dual purpose.  First, when fully open, you can use them as an ironing surface.

And second, you can pack up your hot iron at the end of the day without waiting for it to cool off,

After all my machine stitching was done, I was so excited.  I wanted to celebrate by taking the caddy to the store and finding some really cute and knobby buttons.  I even made sure I still had some Jo-Ann coupons.  And then I asked myself  "Really?  You have hundreds and hundreds of buttons at home and you mean to tell me you can't find something that will work?"  So I stacked three buttons and made a minuscule dent in my button collection.  

I'm going to reward my goodness, though.  Next time buttons go on sale, I'm going to be there loading up on weird and cute ones.

I'm glad I went with the ponytail elastic recommended by The Painted Quilt, instead of the plain white elastic that was in the original instructions.

So here they are, just itching for an opportunity to get out and travel a bit.

I'm happy with the way everything turned out, and even happier to have it done so I can work on a new quilt.