A while back we had a nanny who was in her 70s. When the baby was asleep she would keep busy by doing our laundry (which was wonderful). She had superhuman laundry folding skills, due I’m sure to decades of experience. I could take lots of time and care and not come anywhere near the neatness and precision she would apply to all of the laundry, including to my amazement, fitted sheets. They would be perfectly square and flat, done without the benefit of extra helping hands.
So how do you fold fitted sheets neatly? I know you must the use ends of the seams that make the pockets as the corners, matching them up while the elastic edge falls to the inside. With a flat sheet, some sides of the folded rectangle are the edges of the sheet, which you can let hang while applying tension to keep the folded edges straight.
With a fitted sheet, all sides are folds. I can get one end neat, but as soon as I start trying to gather up the other end, it all goes to hell.
A few years ago - when I had quite a bit more disposable income than I do now, I had a lady who would come in and do some work.
She was magic in so many ways. One of the things she could do was fold the sheets, flat and fitted into wafer thin layers to place into the closet. The other thing was to make the kitchen SHINE.
To this day I try to emulate her - just cannot do it.
This youtube video is very good at demonstrating it:
My method is slightly different from that guy’s. Toward the end, he is very precise about making the fitted corner align perfectly in a rectangle. What I do instead is make a rougher approximation of a rectangle – doesn’t need to be perfect. Then, I fold the sheet in thirds so that the bunchiness of the fitted corners is pretty well hidden on the inside of the folded sheet.
There is no way an iron is going to be brought into service for the mere folding of sheets in this house. It usually takes a wedding or a funeral for the iron to make an appearance around here.
Just spread it out, elastic side up. Make a rectangle by pulling at the corners, the elastic stays in the middle. Depending on your mindset, it can close enough or just right, then fold as a normal rectangular sheet.
I do it slightly differently, and I think mine is a tiny bit easier. He started on the lengthwise fold. That’s dumb to me - you can see him stretching his arms into two corners that are so far from each other! I do the widthwise fold first; this way you can easily suspend the whole thing in the air to shake it out for some initial smoothing.
Either way, the next step is to fold it the other way, and you end up with the whole thing in quarters, and we are the same from there on.
I don’t care too much either. One thing I did pick up from WhyNot is this great idea: when you get all your stuff out of the laundry, and you have a “set” of sheets (pillowcases, sheets, etc.,), after you finish folding them, put the entire set into one of the pillowcases. Voila! You always know where all of the set is!
