Towels. Ah, an interesting subject. I am clueless about towels, or so I’m told. I still argue with a certain friend about whether a washcloth is a towel or not. (It is, right? Back me up here.) For my use, I have two sets that are exactly the same. They have to be folded thirds longway, then quarters shortway in order to fit into the closet space. This has nothing to do with hanging them up – I have hooks in my bathroom.

My kitchen towels are folded as they’re hung, thirds then halves. This has the dual advantage of getting them to fit their space and easy to grab and hang.

I love having guests so I have 3-4 sets of guest towels, each set a different color so the guests don’t get their towels mixed up. For those to fit in their space, it’s quarters longway then thirds.

Sounds a bit psycho, doesn’t it? But as a result they’re easy to get to and in good shape. The sets I have, even my daily use towels, have lasted a deceade and going strong.

I’ve never understood the obsession with folding towels in thirds. My mom always just folded ours in half, then in half the long way, then folded up like the last two pictures. This worked great, plus when you put a “folded in half” towel on the rack, you can actually USE it!

One other thing – my MIL is totally obsessive about folding her towels like shown above, yet they only have hooks for bath towels, and when she uses smaller towels (to dry her face after washing it at night, for example), she just stuffs it back on the bar, without folding it and hanging it neatly. She does the same thing with washclothes, then complains she has to use a clean one every time she washes her face (morning and night). If you hang things up neatly, they’ll dry and can be reused a couple of times before washing! So why the obsession with neatly folding the towel in thirds for the closet?

Lots of folks posting that they have done it this way forever or that they can’t believe there are people who don’t know how blah, blah, blah… but I have to say
“Hey, I’m a guy.” I certainly would never have risked the unmanly situation of asking my mom how to fold a sheet or towel when I was growing up. Things have changed in this day and age, but back then I would have felt silly even possessing such knowledge.

BTW, Erin, your sock drawer looks amazingly like mine – minus the hosiery, of course.

The only downside? My husband refuses to fold towels because he “can’t fold them right.”