Little Refreshes

So, Tumblr user FallenWithStyle posted a picture of her adorable cat flopped on her ironing board, and I noticed that we have the same iron, which led to follow up pictures of the fortune cookie slips she taped to the iron (no, really, it makes complete sense), which led me to decide that it would be fun to put stickers on my iron.  Which I did today.

And then I decided that, if I wanted to take pictures of this iron in its native habitat, then I really should make a new ironing board cover .  The cover I'd been using was not only stained, but it also didn't fit with my current aesthetic mode and it was just a pillowcase sloppily safety-pinned in place, anyway.  Heh.  So I cut it off in a way that could be used as a pattern and improvised my way into a new, neutral, elasticized replacement with which I'm very happy.  (No pictures of just the cover, though.  That seemed a bit too boring even for me.)

Then, since I had the stickers out, it seemed like a good idea to replace some of the worn and faded old stickers on my serger.  I had, once upon a time, thought about removing all of the stickers, but they've been on so long that the bare plastic is more or less its original color where they were and yellowed where they weren't.  So, hey, since it's splotchy anyway, might as well add more stickers, right?

I'm still working on removing dried paper and adhesive residue where one sticker wrapped around a corner...and then probably a lot more stickers that aren't visible here, because I've learned that paper stickers don't always hold up well--clear plastic and holographic foil stickers are the way to go. *nods*

As long as I was taking a picture of the serger, might as well take a picture of the lockstitch machine.

I thrifted this machine almost three years ago and still adore it.  The bobbin area is very quiet--I tend to think it's out of thread when it's not.  (The noisiest part of it is the badly-designed-attachment of the plate on the handwheel side, which wants to rattle/buzz alarmingly at certain speeds.  That was solved by strategic application of a length of washi tape.)  When the bobbin does start to get noisy, that means it's time to clean out the lint...

And, finally, I took a picture of this just 'cause

It's probably one of my favorite sewing gadgety things.  Does anyone else have one of these?