Caring for Table Linens and Kitchen Cloths

Wash the table linens before you put them away, not before you use them. I learned that one the hard way with a tablecloth my grandmother embroidered, which spent a year folded in a drawer with an invisible spot of butter on it and came out with a permanent brown mark exactly where the butter had been. Oil oxidizes slowly in storage. What looks clean when you fold it does not stay that way, and by the time you can see the stain it has had twelve months to set.

Table and kitchen linens get less attention than sheets and towels because they get used less often, and that is exactly why they need a slightly different approach.

The three groups, and how they differ

Everyday kitchen cloths. Dish towels, cloth napkins you actually use at dinner, bar mops. These are workhorses. Wash them hot, wash them often, do not use fabric softener on them, and expect them to look worn. A dish towel that repels water is a useless dish towel, and softener is what does that to them.

Occasional table linens. The tablecloth that comes out for company, the runner, the set of napkins that match something. These live folded for long stretches and get used a few times a year.

Heirloom or delicate pieces. Embroidered, lace edged, vintage, hand made. Different rules again, and mostly gentler ones.

Everyday cloths: the part that goes wrong

Dish towels go sour faster than anything else in the house because they spend their lives damp. The routine that fixed it for me:

• Hang them open after every use. Not folded over a handle. Open, on a hook or a bar, so both faces dry.
• Wash hot with an enzyme detergent, once a week minimum. Hot is genuinely warranted here in a way it is not for clothing.
• No softener, no dryer sheets. Absorbency is the entire job.
• If they already smell, strip them. A hot wash with a cup of vinegar and no detergent, then a second hot wash with detergent, clears most of it.

I keep two stacks of kitchen cloths: cotton flour sack towels for drying dishes and glassware, because they leave no lint, and thicker terry ones for wiping counters and hands. Mixing those two jobs meant I was always drying a wine glass with something that had just been used on a countertop.

Occasional table linens

The pattern here is: use, wash promptly, dry, store dry and loosely.

Treat spots the same day. Wine, oil, and candle wax are the usual three. Wine gets a pile of salt on it during the meal and hot water poured through it later. Oil gets dish soap worked in with a thumb. Wax gets frozen or chilled until it is brittle, cracked off, and the residual ring then gets treated with dish soap.

Soak whites overnight. After a holiday meal I fill a bucket with warm water and fully dissolved oxygen bleach and let the napkins sit until morning. This does more than any spot treatment I have tried and it takes no attention.

Do not store them starched. Starch attracts insects and it yellows over time. Starch when you are about to use something, not when you are about to put it away.

Store rolled or loosely folded. Sharp permanent creases eventually break the fibers along the fold line, and on an old tablecloth that is where holes appear first. I roll my tablecloth around a cardboard tube wrapped in a clean cotton pillowcase, and I refold the napkins along different lines each time.

Everything I have ever lost to storage was lost to something I could not see when I folded it. Wash first, dry completely, store loose.

Heirloom and delicate pieces

Gentler on every axis. Hand wash in cool water with a mild detergent, or the delicate cycle inside a mesh bag if the piece is sturdy enough. No chlorine bleach ever, because it weakens old cotton and linen fast and yellows it further.

Do not wring. Press the water out between two towels, then dry flat.

Store in cotton or acid free tissue, never in plastic. Plastic traps moisture and off gasses, and both of those yellow fabric over years. A cedar chest is fine, a sealed plastic bin is not.

My grandmother’s tablecloth now lives rolled in a pillowcase on a closet shelf and comes out three or four times a year. The butter stain is still there. I have made peace with it, and it is a reasonably good reminder.

Ironing, only where it earns its keep

I iron table linens and almost nothing else, because a tablecloth is one of the few things where the flatness is the point.

Iron them slightly damp. If they have dried fully, mist with water and give it a minute to absorb rather than ironing a dry crease, which just polishes it in. Linen wants a hot iron and steam. Cotton wants hot and slightly less steam. Anything with embroidery gets ironed face down on a towel so the stitches press into the padding instead of getting flattened.

Then hang the tablecloth over a chair back or a rod for an hour before folding, because folding a warm ironed cloth immediately puts the creases right back in.

Napkins are worth switching to

The change I would recommend to anyone is going to cloth napkins for daily meals. Not for the aesthetics, though they do look better. It is that a stack of cotton napkins costs almost nothing to run, they wash in with the towels, and they replaced a running paper expense in my house with a load of laundry I was doing anyway.

I keep sixteen plain ones in a drawer, in a color that hides tomato sauce, and I do not iron those. They go from the dryer into the drawer folded in quarters and nobody has ever commented on it.