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The Junk Parlor

How to Fold a Towel

Who folds the laundry at your house? Let’s learn how to fold a towel.

I don’t remember when I started folding laundry growing up and I’m going to be honest I doubt I did it very often.  But what I do remember is that my mom definitely expressed that there was a right way and a wrong way to fold towels.  And that if I was going to fold the laundry, I needed to do it the right way.

Her attention to detail definitely wore off on me.  My type A personality understood her logic behind folding towels a certain way, although I doubt I let her know that! I know my own children are not very enthusiastic when I tell them the right way to fold a towel.

Where Do You Put Your Towels?

How you fold your towels may be a little different depending on where you are going to be putting them.

Location

Well I would say the first thing you have to do is to determine WHERE you will be storing your towels.

In our old house I had a pie safe with the doors removed in the middle of the bathroom.  This cabinet held everything including our towels.  Because the doors were removed my towels were always out in the open.

When you have your towels out on display, you want them to look nice.  That starts with having matching towels.  I have all gray towels HOWEVER I purchased some and some have been given to us as gifts.  So although I think we have purchased all of them from Target over the years, they are definitely not all the same color of gray!

In the new house we keep some under the sink and some in a drawer.  These are both locations where the towels are not visible to anyone but us because they are behind closed doors.

Size Of Storage

Once you determine where you are going to put your towels then you know the size you need to fold them!

Folding towels into thirds fits so many more spaces and ALWAYS looks good! But you may just choose to fold them in half.

Step by Step Folding A Towel

The first step to folding a towel is to fold it in half. Bring both short ends of the towel together so they line up. Now, the older your towels are the more you will realize that there really are no straight short ends. This shrinkage probably is also influenced by the quality of towel you have. We get most of our towels from Target, like THESE.

So don’t spend a lot of time lining them up. At our house we seem to fold towels daily, so “get in, get out.”

Once you have the short ends lined up, grab them and fold them to the fold you just created. See in the picture how I brought the short ends to the fold but I didn’t bring them all the way over and line them up with the fold? The picture also shows you how my short ends aren’t lined up perfectly.

Lining up perfectly doesn’t matter to us. In fact, for this fold to work, DO NOT line up the short ends with the fold. The short ends should be just inside the fold.


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Now imagine dividing that towel into thirds. You are going to take the bottom of the towel that is closest to you and fold it. The fold will be 1/3 of the way up the towel. The end of the towel will be 2/3rds up from the end of the towel when you started or you can look at it as 1/3 of the towel is still in view and has not been part of the folding.

To finish, fold the towel again. Make the fold where the end of the towel is 2/3rds the way up the towel. This should get your fold up to the end of the towel. For the pictures I am showing you from what I call the bottom of the folded towel.

Just like with a short side being folded just to the folded edge, but not even with or farther than, that is what we want here too. We want the end of the towel to be shorter than the fold. That way when we put the raw edge down, we don’t see any raw edges.

Folding the towel this way makes it look pretty from all angles. Folding it in thirds also allows it to fit on this shelf. If my shelf was deeper than I could only fold it in half and the front view would still be pretty. However I have found the folding the towel into thirds always works better in a space.

Even in the drawer above you can see how more towels will fit into the drawer when it is folded into thirds. Versus the drawer on the right where I have only folded the towels in half.

How Many Towels Do You Need?

We moved to Ankeny 6 months ago and I purged SO MUCH stuff.  I know everyone is into spending the New Year decluttering and spring cleaning in the fall, but if you really want to pare down, MOVE!  Or don’t move and instead, everytime you touch something, think to yourself,  if I moved, would I want to take this with me?  If the answer is no then throw it away or donate it!  

Want to hear more about our move? Check THIS out.

So how many towels does a person need?  One to use, while one is in the wash, and an extra on the shelf.  So for our family of 5, we need 15 towels.  Let’s be honest we have a lot more bathroom towels!

Let me give us both permission to throw away any towels with holes or seams that are coming apart!

An Alternative to Folding Towels

Don’t want to fold towels?

I have the perfect solution! S hooks!

In the master bathroom of the new house we have THREE towel bars, THREE!!  It’s stupid.  Especially when I am not a towel bar fan.

Guess how many towel bars we had in the old house? ZERO and we had 4 bathrooms! Zero towel bars!

Now I COULD remove these towel bars, but that would leave big holes in the drywall.  I know you can patch drywall, but I have never seen a patch job that you couldn’t see…if you know what I mean.

Instead of living with empty towel bars or looking at imperfect walls I decided to try S hooks. It seemed like a good solution to my dilemma.

And guess what! I love them. I’ve put them in my bathroom and the kids bathrooms and it automatically makes the spaces look better. Kids can’t fold a towel to make it pretty on the bar, but they can easily hang a towel on a hook!

Here are the S hooks I ordered.

Selecting S Hooks

Style

The first thing I did before ordering S hooks was to see if my towel bar would remove easily. You know how the toilet paper holder works? You push it to one side and the bar comes out? IF my towel bar would have done that then I was going to order hooks like THIS.

But the bar was in place unless you unscrewed one end, so I just ordered the S hooks that are open on both ends.

They also make some clip ones like THIS if you are worried about the hooks coming off. The ones I have don’t come off when you are drying your hands, but sometimes they will when you remove a towel from the hook. To solve that problem, one hand goes on the top of the S hook and one hand goes on the towel.

Color

Once you know the style of S hook you want, then you need do decide on a color. Most of our bathrooms have black or dark bronze towel bars. One bathroom does have a silver towel bar, but it was not my top priority for this project. Because of that I ordered black. While spray paint will eventually wear off, you can spray paint them if you buy a mulit-pack of S hooks yet have different finishes in the rooms where you will be using the S hooks.

This post may contain affiliate links for the products I use and recommend. I am not paid to promote these products. If you purchase using my affiliate links, I could make a small commission at no charge to you.

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Hi, I’m Brooke. Welcome to The Junk Parlor.

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