At 02:06 PM 10/10/05 -0700, Adele Shaak wrote: > . . . we have a bunch of your "primitive" irons at work
Are these the kind with one handle and two irons, or the kind that are cast all on one piece? The former is better for ironing because the handle doesn't get as hot, but the earlier model is more picturesque, so it's more likely to have been preserved. I have one of each, which I'm using as book-ends. Neither is fit to use -- I think the two-piece iron could be shined up, but it has lost its partner and would be hard to use without one. (Not to mention that I broke the brittle old wooden handle-release knob while investigating how it works, just now. I tied the broken-off bit in a rag and tied the rag to the knob. And now I wonder how they ever secured the wooden knob to the knob-ended rod that pulls up on the latch. Seems to have been put in through the top; perhaps the iron rod screws into the latch, like pot knobs.) (It is, come to think of it, the exact size and shape of porcelain pot knobs -- I wonder why they didn't use one? Perhaps the pot knobs came along after electric irons.) I suppose that most people who find a pair of irons in the attic think that one is broken, and throw it away. Mom had a big one-piece iron called a "tailor's goose" that she used for a doorstop in the forties. Both one-piece and detachable-handle sad irons are still being made, but I've never seen an advertisement for a box iron -- indeed it was a long time after Tamara first described them that I learned that "box iron" was the English name for the iron with a soul, and I think I came across it while looking something else up in a dictionary. I suspect that "sad iron" was a retronym given to the formerly-ordinary iron after the box iron was invented: being solid, it would seem more substantial than the hollow modern iron, and "sad" used to mean "heavy". > Ours are fairly tiny > compared to modern irons - maybe 7" long (17.5 cm or thereabouts) I got down the Lehman's catalog, and the only non-ornamental one-piece iron is 3 3/4 inches long! If I still had a wood stove, I'd buy one for pressing seams. It's only nickel-plated, not stainless steel, alas. My bookend is 6" long, and the two-piece iron is 7". The soleplate of my old dry electric is 7 3/4", but the overall length is 9". The old steam iron is 8"/9 1/4", the newer one -- which I no longer use -- is 8 1/4/9" -- Joy Beeson http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ http://home.earthlink.net/~dbeeson594/ROUGHSEW/ROUGH.HTM http://home.earthlink.net/~beeson_n3f/ west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where it's misting rain. To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
