Mark and I bought new sheets. I’ve been thinking about new sheets ever since our holiday to the Maritimes and our celebratory 10th anniversary stay at a luxe hotel in old Montreal.
I have come to this conclusion: good sheets are a MUST HAVE. Not a maybe, or perhaps tomorrow, but if you’re going to spend ANY MONEY in your household it should be on v.v.v.good bed linens. Otherwise you might as well be sleeping in a barn, on flour sacks, stuffed with hay, and then you’d die and discover, while lying on cozy clouds up in heaven that your life here on earth with polyblends was a little empty and sad.
The sheets we bought are I-dunno-but-totally-high-thread-count-cotton-supima. They are a light shade of sage green with gold sheen that made my heart hurt with wanting when I saw them. There is a subtle check woven into them and they have a certain density and skinfeel that we haven’t ever had before this. They are delicious.
We bought the sheet set, some extra pillowcases, and a creamy coloured duvet cover. Sleeping in our bed now is like sleeping in the beautiful home of imaginary wealthy relatives, relatives who have good taste in sheets.
These sheets are rich and CRISP and god I just want to cry I love them so much. Is it wrong to love bed sheets this much? Sliding into them is like sliding into your dreams AND YOU’RE NOT EVEN ASLEEP YET.
Anyway, I’ve washed the sheets twice now and twice I have been stuck, STUCK ironing them, sweating my face off, and the ironing board collapsed once under the pressure and narrowly missed squashing my toes. I’ve never ironed my sheets before. I know. It’s terrible. But our old ones never wrinkled as much as these ones do. I spent 45 minutes ironing everything yesterday because I could not WOULD NOT put such a wrinkled mass of fine linens on our bed. It would be SACRELIGIOUS.
The trick to getting those perfectly ironed bed sheets has somehow eluded me.
So far, this has been my technique.
1) Wash.
2) Shake out.
3) Dry until damp to the touch.
4) Shake AGAIN.
5) Iron with hot iron PRESSING down to maximize my time.
Pillowcases are easy, but what about the sheets? Ours are queen size. I dryed the fitted sheet (who here uses dryer balls, are they worth it?) and SPRINTED upstairs with it, rushing to put it on the bed while it was still hot. The flat sheet has been impossible to iron without re-wrinkling the part I just ironed, so I’ve taken to only ironing the outermost edges about, um, one ironing board deep.
It was still damp to the touch when I spread it out on the bed last night. It dried in place, not bad, but not great. What do I need to do to make it great? Have them dry cleaned? ;)
[With a bit of googling I learned I need to fold them in half. WHERE HAVE I BEEN. Are you supposed to do both sides too?]
What about you? Have you discovered the joy of good bed linens? And do you have any ironing tricks that would make my life easier?