When I was growing up, ironing was as art form.   In my family, EVERYTHING got ironed, from my dad’s work shirts, to shirts and dresses, towels and sheets.  I don’t remember underwear getting the once over, but I could just be suppressing that memory.  My mother had me ironing pretty early – starting when I was in first grade – and she instructed me in the correct way to do every kind of garment/fabric.  When my dad’s ship came in, Nonny’s first luxury was to send out the laundry to be ironed.  She still washed and dried everything but then it went into a bag to get picked up by the ironing person twice a week.  I can still see the ironed items (in garment bags) hanging in the front closet after they were returned in pristine shape.

I do have an iron, but it gets lonely in the closet.  The only thing I’ve ironed in the last year was the quilt that I inherited from Nonny (well, inherited is probably the wrong word.  “helped myself to” is more like it).  And the only reason I ironed it was that I was adding sticky fabric tape to several places where the fabric had basically disintegrated over the years.  YA probably uses the iron and ironing board maybe once a quarter.

When I went off to college, Nonny did send a little travel iron with me.  Snort.  The very first things that I quit ironing were my sheets.  They stretch out on your bed and you sleep on them, for goodness sakes.  Sheets were quickly followed by just about everything else. I never looked back.

With this in mind, I’m not sure what the heck I was looking at on YouTube a few days ago, but for some reason, a few posts came up about how to fold a fitted sheet.  Then I made the fatal error of clicking on one.  Now my feed is full of folks seriously showing me how to fold a fitted sheet — all of them basically the same method – sticking the two lower corners into the top upper corners, then folding into thirds or fourths and then folding again.  It LOOKS easy, but I remember trying this years ago and it’s not that simple.  And if you’re dealing with slippery sheets, of which I have several sets for the summer, the method doesn’t really work at all.  I did find a YouTube of how I do it…

I don’t actually chuck it into the closet.  After I’ve wadded it up, I then put the folded top sheet and the pillow cases on top and then gently slide the whole pile onto the shelf.  I’m not a savage.

Toward the end of her life, I know for a fact that Nonny was still ironing some of her clothing, but she had abandoned ironing the sheets, thank goodness.  Whenever I would visit and help her with laundry, she would have us do the two-person fold.  I’m now sure what she was doing on her own.  I hope she was wadding the fitted sheet into a ball, but somehow I doubt it!

Do you fold fitted sheets?  What method do you use?  Do you use a top sheet?  Linen closet or drawers?