My Gift to the World

I was gratified beyond expectation by the personal responses I received to my obsessive advice on toilet paper and dishwasher loading. One new mother told me how she never paid attention to toilet paper loading and when she was up in the middle of the night, feeding her new cutie, she would head into the bathroom in the dark. More than once, a tired husband ended up doing a pee-pee jig in the door, pleading for her to hurry up while she helplessly spun the toilet paper roll around and around in the dark, grasping for the elusive end. After reading my earlier post, she now loads the roll the 'right way', and dear hubbie's painful prancing has come to an end. I daresay I changed their lives!

It is armed with this belief that my annoying attention to tiny details could benefit others that has led me to today's post. I am about to bestow onto the world the greatest knowledge I have to share, the solution to endless frustration and the satisfying creation of a thing of beauty. Today, right here, I will share with you how to fold a fitted sheet.

The first critical piece of advice I have for you is that a fitted sheet can not be folded in the air. Arms outstretched, grasping corners, and bringing them neatly together, while ideal for the neatness of a flat sheet, is a terrible method to try to fold a fitted sheet. The flat and the fitted trick you with their similarities into believing they can be treated the same way. They cannot. The fitted sheet demands a subtle hand, a gentle shaping, an intimate level of attention that the flat sheet gladly does without. The flat sheet is a hussy, while the fitted sheet is a noble dame, demanding appropriate attention and caressing before yielding to your hands.

As such, the fitted sheet, first and foremost, needs a flat surface on which to be shaped. If you have a sheet to fold, then I must presume you also have a bed and recommend using that surface for your folding needs:

With some practice, you can eventually move your skills to the couch while watching your stories, but do not be so bold as to jump right to that advanced folding placement. Start with the bed. Once there, find your four corners:

Once you have embraced and let this method be a part of your soul, you won't need to spread out the entire sheet as shown below, but start here Grasshopper:

This next critical step sadly lacks an effective photo, mostly because I recognize this endeavor to be ridiculous enough not to call Bob in from the other room and ask for help with the photography. What I am trying to show below is inverting one of the corners and inserting your hand like a mitt. (What we actually see below is how far apart my camera hand and my sheet hand can get. We also see, depending on the quality of your monitor, that I only buy sheets on sale and have poorly sewn this ripped seam together):

Take your mitted sheet hand and fit the corner you are holding inside it's opposing corner. Do this on both ends of the sheet so that you have essentially folded the sheet in half, but with the corners tucked into each other:

And here is where the magic can start to happen. The satisfying ease of the flat sheet is the right angles while the frustrating difficulty of the fitted sheet is it's lack of the same. What we are about to do with the fitted sheet is introduce the critical right angles that allow the neat and clean pile we all want to see at the end. To do this, fold the outer edges into the center. You will be folding the puffy, rounded, elasticized and bulky corners into the center, and giving yourself a clean right edge. The sheet I am illustrating with here is a king-size, so size of folds may be different with other size sheets, but the key is to get a right-ish angle where a corner should be:

Repeat with both sides so you are now dealing with a boxy shape:

Depending on the size of your sheet, you can now fold with the ease of corners as you would a flat sheet. With this king-size sheet, I folded it in half longways:

Now don't go running off to your laundry, thinking you've heard all my tricks and the path to the perfect fitted sheet is clear. We have one more important lesson to learn, a misconception from flat sheet folding that we must cast aside to find success with the fitted sheet. With the flat sheet we are used to meeting corners and folding in half. Whether up or down or side-to-side, we just keep folding in half until we have a neat square. I must remind you again - the flat sheet and the fitted are entirely different! We must embrace the concept of thirds with the fitted sheet, and it is this beauty of the triad that will finally allow you to know the peace of a perfectly folded fitted sheet.

What we have done by hiding the difficult rounded corners is create one bulky end and one smooth flat end:

Using the fold-in-half-and-half-again method now would lead you to trying to create a fold in the bulky corner collection and even if successfully folded, would leave you with one cowlicky end that keeps trying to pop up. Enter the tri-fold! Fold the bulky end down a third:

Then fold the smooth, thin end up a third. You have now taken the neatest part of your folded sheet and covered the most troubling, uneven part:

Even Doozer is impressed with how the mess of fabric from the first photo has turned into this shapely pile:

The final, beautiful epilogue to this tale of the fitted sheet: as the rounded corners of the fitted and the sharp corners of the flat sheet are reunited, joined into a "set", destined to stack together in the linen closet until it is time for them, once again, to be unfurled.