Yes Virginia, There Is No Such Thing As An Ironing Fairy

I suppose I'm glad I pre-washed the batiks with the color catchers.  In my search for validation for prewashing batiks in a few online forums I ran across more than one post that said that Retayne, and Synthropol, and Color Catchers don't really work all that well in a front loading washing machine.  Well, I'm not about to go to the local laundromat (I reserve that trip for flannel rag quilts), so I decided that the way to approach this was to wash a small amount of fabric in a hot water wash with an extra rinse.  I separated the batiks into two loads and after drying them both I tossed them in together for one more wash cycle. As you can see from the Color Catchers above, I'm still going to need to use one when I wash the finished quilt the first couple of times.

So that left me with a basket full of ironing, which I left out in the kitchen in the hopes that the Ironing Fairy would come last night and press everything into submission.  Sadly, when I woke up in the morning, I tripped over the even more wrinkled than it had been the night before basket o' batiks on my way to the Keurig--damn her!

Luckily I have the Reliable steam iron, which, coupled with a bottle of 4 year old spray starch I found in the workshop (obviously I don't iron much), turned those wrinkled batiks into 'fresh off the bolt' batiks. I swear, you wouldn't know they'd been washed.  And now they even smell pretty good.  Mission accomplished.

Now all I've got to do is get back into slice and dice mode and cut out those 1029 pieces and commence to paper piecing, though I really, really should finish up Grand Illusion....tick, tick, tick.