Confessions of a reluctant ironer

I finally bought these sheets for the guest bed, which are perfect with the room and oh look!, also match the hand towels in the adjoining bathroom. I'd been stalking them for ages hoping to find something I liked just as much at a lower price point, but that never happened, so in anticipation of two fabulous houseguests arriving next weekend, I finally bit the bullet. Pearl embroidered sheets in red arrived yesterday, just perfect out of the package (and happily un-monogrammed, of course). Rejoice! Bedding problem solved!

I washed them, because that's what you do with new sheets before you put them on the bed. Only, when they came out of the dryer, their perfection was no more. The washed and dried sheet set looked like a pile of white garbage that had been left to die a painful death in a wind tunnel. Which I suppose sounds very much like a dryer, now that I think about it. But these sheets weren't just wrinkled, they were 90-year-old-smoker-with-a-tanning-bed-addiction wrinkled. What do I do with this?!

Does this mean... I'm not that kind of girl! Surely I don't have to...

IRON SHEETS?! 

Isn't that the stuff of Martha apprentices and brittle Wasps who have entire rooms devoted to storing their heirloom linens? But there I was:

Only, not so much, because the true ironer of the house quickly came to my assistance after being appalled at my ironing technique. He's a much more effective ironer than I am. Wearing crisp shirts to work every day instead of my current tank top and yoga pants will do that a person, I suppose.

Two refills of water in the iron later, the sheets look okay on the bed, but nothing like the crisp glory I'd imagined for the sight straight across from my work desk five days a week. Major bummer. This leads me to my next question:

Is this thing for real?

While I admit that a mere two days ago I would've scoffed at the very notion of this machine, even now, wrinkled sheets and all, I'd spend $2,000 on approximately two thousand items before even considering purchasing this thing.  And so I must ask:

1) Seriously... how do you get the wrinkles out of these damn sheets without having the previously noted "linen room" and a $2,000 ironing apparatus?

2) How do I ensure that I never, ever, ever fall in love with sheets again that turn out to be the bane of my not-even-anal-about-wrinkles-unlike-others-in-my-household existence?

3) $2,000? Seriously?

While we're on the hot topic of ironing, I will confess there was lots of ironing humor in play during our European vacay last week. See, by the time we met T's family in Ljubljana, our clothes looked and smelled exactly like they'd spent four days in rainy on the outside/smoky on the inside Prague and Vienna, with nary a hotel iron in sight. I quickly realized where T's ironing love comes from after his father was late to the first wedding event of the week due to his own fretful search for a hotel iron in Ljubljana (seriously - they don't exist in any city we stayed in, don't even bother asking). The group of us ended up setting off hotel heat sensors the next few days due to excessive shower steaming of our clothes, until my father-in-law broke down and found an iron in a Ljubljana department store, which promptly became the hottest item in town among all 34 wedding guests. ("I heard someone has an iron." "Go to the ninth floor, knock on room 907." "Really? Someone scored one?" "What can I do to get a piece of that iron?")

That said, any guesses what my gift to all the in-laws will be this Christmas?

Black and Decker Travel Iron