Shirt Origami

The weekend is my reserved for washing. A family with two small children brings together quite an impressive array of dirty clothes during one week. In our family unit, I’m the one tasked with the weekly fight againt entropy and dirt. It’s not my favorite pastime, but I actually enjoy being down in the cellar and folding our clothes. It’s a quiet hour, good for thinking, listening to the iPod and calming down, after a weekend with two very active kids.

Thanks to Isotopp I found the text on ideengeberin.de (you are going into my blog-roll, Nicole) to a link from the M-E-X blog on shirt folding, japanese style. There’s a video on it, that explains a very simple method of folding a shirt. After seeing it, I tried it - and had my first t-shirt folded in 5 seconds.

There’s a german description on how to actually do the folding (linked from the M-E-X log) but for the pleasure of our non-german speaking community, here’s my english description.

1. Lay the shirt in front of you, neck facing right.
2. 3. Place your right hand about one inch from the neck towards the shoulder, using index and thumb to grab the cloth
3. place your left hand on the same height as the left, in the middle of the shirt
4. move the right hand across the left, pulling the shirt with you until you have folded it around your left hand
5. Use another finger of the right hand to pick up the cloth you just put your right hand on
6. Lift both hands - you now hold a tangled mess of t-shirt in your hand
7. pull your left hand free (down-left), while at same time turning your wrist so that you look at the underside of it
8. the shirt is now folded almost correctly, one arm is left dangling. Lay it on the table and do the final fold away from you

It sounds a lot more complicated than it really is….

Now, excuse me while I hasten downstairs to see if my shirts are dry already….