Declutter Kitchen Drawers With Martha Stewart's Towel Storage Tip

With all of the big picture kitchen organizing projects that one can attack, it can be easy to let smaller details fall through the cracks. But tidiness actually has a cumulative effect. Get your utensils in order, create a clutter-free counter landscape, and a lot of the rest will sort itself out. Kitchen towels might seem like the sort of loveless accessory that can simply be rolled, haphazardly folded, or — heaven forbid — carelessly stuffed away, but a few extra seconds curated by celebrity perfection expert Martha Stewart can actually make a disproportionate improvement.

Stewart's textile tip is top for creating more space in tiny kitchens and double-island behemoths alike. She essentially folds the towels into uniform rectangles for a more tailored appearance and streamlined storing. Now, Stewart has been peddling this hack since before even the days of internet virality, demonstrating on items of various sizes. You can likely replicate the effect absent further instruction. But we have found that folding a fairly standard-sized kitchen towel lengthwise and then twice more longitudinally does the trick.

In addition to a nicely arranged kitchen towel drawer having superior aesthetics, it will also save space and be a little easier to sift through. For one, the uniform rectangles just occupy a smaller area than the volume consumed by a less studied fabric wad. And, like elegant pocket squares of absorbency, it's easier to leaf through a neat stack of rectangles to identify a preferred towel for any given task (old, tattered towels for messier jobs, lint-free terrycloth for actual dish-drying, and so on), than to paw through a pile.

But speaking of style, you can also feel a little more confident about leaving those kitchen towels out when they're properly presented. While a pile of kitchen towels signals sloppy, unfinished tasks, a proper stack telegraphs thoughtful grooming down to the last detail. Place them in something like a cute basket for an even more intentional look. This folding technique, of course, also applies to cloth napkins and even rags that might not otherwise get such an elite treatment.