I usually reserve Fridays for fiction writing. Armed with a writing prompt provided by WordPress blogger, SidevieW, I’ve spent the past month generating Friday’s fiction based on her theme. Today’s theme “DOING IT RIGHT” has less of fiction feel… Here goes…

Which is the right way?

Towel Wars

My mother has ONE way to fold a towel. The right way.

• Lay the towel on a flat surface
• fold the width of the towel in thirds
• then fold it in half length wise
• and fold in half again.

It makes for a nice compact square of towel-ly goodness.

Mom’s method. Start with a flat towel. Four steps later… You’ve done it “the right way.”

Martha Steward folds her towels that way. So does Oprah. But, let me be clear… my mom did it first. (Maybe not first in the whole world, but before these two gals became daytime goddesses.)

Necessity being the mother of invention, mom came up with that method so they’d fit nicely into our linen closet. In fact, on laundry day, after the towels had been washed, line dried and folded (properly) and the linen closet reloaded to its towel storage capacity you couldn’t get anything else in there.

My mom must have had an innate sense of towel geometry. Her towel-to-linen closet ratio was absolutely pitch perfect.

The towels were so compactly and precisely placed in that closet that the first person to take a bath was in serious danger or toppling the whole works if they pulled out the top towel too gingerly.

And if the towel had been folded the wrong way, or had been placed in the closet askew… it just would not have worked. They wouldn’t have fit. That’s because there’s a right way of doing something and a wrong way of doing it.

We tried to rebel of course. As we came into our teen years we JUST KNEW that mom’s insistence that we fold the towels “in thirds and in thirds again” was just some 1950’s drivel — like dressing up and fixing your hair to go food shopping.

We tried:

• folding them in half and then in half again (too wide and too flat).
• foldeing in half (short side) and rolling. (too long).
• kind of folding them and stuffing them in (known as the “brother special” — on the rare occasion that he did it at all — (um no.)

No, no. No. NO. Any job worth doing is worth doing right. So you might as well do it right the first time… because mom is only going to make you do it again… the right way.

When my parents downsized from our family home and looked for a condo I don’t think my mom took a folded towel with her on the real estate showings.  But I’m pretty sure she had that inner towel calculator going in her head. A condo without a proper linen closet wasn’t going to pass muster.

Perhaps it is my rebellious nature, my sheer laziness, or the configuration of our towel storage area but I do not use the 3 x 3 folding method mom favored. I fold my towels in half lengthwise, give them a 90 degree turn, fold in half again, then starting at the bound side (not the fold side) roll them tightly.

Crazy, I know, but it works. And, for us it’s just the right way of doing it.

My method. Start with a flat towel. Three steps later… towel nirvana. (OK I’m biased.)

Here’s an alarmingly loud video from “Ask the Decorator” that shows three ways to fold towels.

For the record I would like to state that my mom is a wonderful person, as well as a hell of a towel folder, and I love her very much.

Also for the record… If you would like to come to my house and help me roll my towels … I will let you slide if you roll from the fold side in. I’m flexible that way. (But, yeah… it’d be wrong.)

Related articles

• Towel and Sheet Folding 101: Get It Right the First Time (blackamericaweb.com)
• Linen Closet of Doom (tnsoutherncharm.wordpress.com)
• Quick Tips for Organizing Bathrooms (hardwarebajaar.wordpress.com)