In our house we have a lot of our own tea towels. I like to think of it as a perk of the job that I get to keep the dud prints that have accumulated over the last the 4 years. Although not technically free, they feel free. The tea towels are a 100% linen via Eastern Europe that we source from a supplier in NSW. When they arrive they have a slight stiffness from starch and don't feel like they would be very good at drying the dishes. In fact they are rather terrible at drying things until the first wash when they shrink a little and become a lot more like a tea towel and the linen is lovely fabric to use in the kitchen as its hard wearing and absorbent.
A few months back the cupboard we keep our tea towels in a hot mess with tea towels shoved in and knotted up so much that they all fell out on top of you when you tried to remove just one. I decided to solve this problem by ironing my tea towels into a neat pile and putting them away. A lofty plan I knew I wouldn't be able to keep up, not because I didn't revel in the fact that it was the easiest ironing job in the world or from the satisfaction I got removing all the creases and turning a crinkly, wobbly pile of mess into something neat and ordered. No, it was lofty because retrieving the iron and board out of the cupboard was something I would avoid for no reason other than a good old fashion case of the can't be bothereds. The other night when I opened the tea towels cupboard and again saw the mess they were in I quickly got the iron out before my lazy brain (yes, there is a right side, a left side and a lazy side) had a chance to realise what was going on.
Now look at them sitting there all neat, with the sun shining in like some kind of aaaaahhhhh laaaaaa divine moment in a film. That is the universe telling me I need to iron them more often.
You can buy our tea towels on Etsy and if you, like me, are a lazy brained person then just stretch them our before hanging them up on the line so they dry nice and flat.
