Teflon Iron Shoe
Teflon-coated metal plate that slips over most household irons. Held in place with a metal spring.
Gives a larger pressing surface area, free of steam holes. I swear by these for embossing velvet.
You may have luck finding this or similar products near you. I have not had luck with local stores, so now carry a small stock of them in our Rubber Stamp Accessories section.
Tips for use:
- Mount the shoe on your iron, turn the iron on, and give the iron a little extra time to heat up the Teflon shoe.
- Be sure to empty the iron of water and turn off the steam setting if you are embossing velvet. See the Embossing Velvet link, to the left on the main site, for instructions.
- When using Teflon iron shoes with stamps that are made up of large uninterrupted surface areas (such as the largest crescent moon image), if the stamp isn't centered so that it is being covered/pressed by both the iron and the Teflon shoe, then the part of the image that is being pressed with only the Teflon iron shoe will not have the same sheen as the part that was covered by the iron and the Teflon shoe.
- If you find that your image is not centered and covered by the iron, you can gently glide the iron over the stamp a bit after the first 10 seconds of pressing - you do not want the fabric to shift. This will allow all parts of the image to get some press-time under the iron itself.
- Again, this only seems to be an issue with images that have large uninterrupted surface areas that spill over from the area that the iron covers. Generally the Teflon shoe allows you to have an increased pressing area that you can fully utilize, and factors relating to this issue could be iron temperature (my specific iron), dampness and pressure used.
- As always: EXPERIMENT with scraps.
A note about Teflon pressing cloths:
I do not recommend them because of my own experiences. You may have better luck. I found that they trapped too much of the moisture during the pressing, which led to the fabric retaining the moisture, getting softer and more pliable, and therefore drooping over the stamp and picking up the edges of the stamp that were not supposed to be part of the image.