If you know me, you may be surprised to learn that I like ironing boards.  Not because I iron clothes very often (although we used to iron my son’s kilt and dress shirt before bagpiping performances, and when I say we, I mostly mean my mom, because she is really good at ironing.)  Anyhow, the ironing board that exists at my house is the kind that has the X-shaped legs, that with the pull of a lever can be adjusted  from tall to short, for different ironing heights.  In my craft room, I will sometimes use the board for ironing cloth smooth before cutting out a project, for ironing a folded edge to make sewing a hem easier, or for ironing the fusible sticky stuff for a patch or an applique project. 

But the ironing board is useful for so many other things in my craft room.  I don’t have a work-table, so I use the board as a cutting table or a layout table for small projects.  I use it as a counter for my laptop to stream shows or podcasts while I sew.  As I think about it now, I could use it for a stand-up desk for writing.  It’s the perfect height.

In a living room, one could use an ironing board for a behind-the-couch table by disguising it with a tablecloth. Or even as a TV stand.  Perhaps all TVs are now affixed to walls?  We have a shelf for our large TV.  I don’t know if my ironing board could support the weight of a giant TV, but if it did, we could adjust the height from high to low to provide the perfect viewing situation.  It would all go great until the cat jumped up and pushed the TV off the stand, like he did with a monitor in my son’s room.  Crash.  

Of course, the main use of an ironing board, or any flat spot really, is to lay things upon it.  Piles of cloth, half-finished projects, art supplies, clothes that need mending, clothes that don’t need mending, pencils, cell phones (that then get buried and in order to find them you have to call them from another phone and hope that your ringer is turned on.)  Sometimes I even place the iron on the ironing board. Now and then I clean off the top of the ironing board to fold it up and stow it away, leaving space to move about in the craft room, that can then become a guest room.  Multi-use objects and multi-use spaces matter.

I’ll bet somewhere some tech company is trying to invent a smart ironing board and a smart iron.  Maybe the smart-board will have an electric jack that automatically adjusts to the perfect height for ironing.  Maybe it will iron your shirts while you are away from the house.  Maybe it will talk to you and tell you what temperature it is and then yell at you when you adjust the iron to the linen setting, but start to iron nylon fabric, thereby melting an iron-shaped mark on the garment.  But do we really need all of those smart doohickeys and advancements?  Sometimes the old designs are the best and most functional objects.  As my grandfather used to say, if it aint broke, don’t fix it.