Fancy Cloth Napkins

I've created a monster just by wanting to use cloth napkins in my home.

Way back when I first started out and only had two pair of work shoes, used toilet paper to blow my nose and drank day-old coffee, I still wanted to use cloth napkins. The tables looked so elegant in the magazines. And magazines were all I had for inspiration because HGTV hadn't been invented yet. Much to my disappointment, the cloth napkins in the tabletop department cost nearly five dollars each. And if they were going to be used for multiple meals on a daily basis, I'd need more than two. The price of my vision was slowly adding up. What if we had company?

One day I was in a kitchen store (danger, danger) and I saw a stack of cloth dish towels on sale. They even had a retro pattern that matched our dishes. I scooped up six for the price of two cloth napkins and became the savvy hostess with the large napkins that covered your lap and then some. I even went back and bought three more in a complementing pattern, cut them in half and made placemats. No one who came to dinner had ever seen such table settings. I could fold the napkins several ways or fan them out in wine glasses. And when we weren't having company, we still had enough napkins for ourselves.

As time went on and tastes changed, I would retire the more senior "napkins" to the dish towel drawer and replace them with newer color choices. I still used the dish towel idea for our napkins. After awhile, I had had three sets of six to get us through the year. My napkins took up two kitchen drawers. The dish towel drawer was across the room.

Everything changed with the birth of our son. He was all in on the concept of cloth napkins for everyone. But he could not stop to wonder which dish towel was a napkin and which one was a dish towel even though they were separately located.  For years I would walk into a room and groan that he was using a new dish towel as a napkin and remind him what the napkin color palette entailed. He also only liked to use whatever cloth item only once, so the laundry was always full of dish towels. Oh, and if it's function was a napkin it was folded one way. If it's function was a dish towel, it was folded another way. That was only obvious to me, not to the men in the house.

Now they both just grab one of the dish towels hanging by the sink and drape their laps. They leave it anywhere that works - a chair, the table, the cutting board or a counter. Since I don't really know what it was used for since it wasn't hanging up or folded, it goes in the wash. So nowadays, I look for sales on dish towels and have several dozen because of the laundry factor. When I am at someone's home, helping with the dishes, I marvel how they can get by with two dish towels. The men in my house remain as confused as ever, and I rest knowing that if I would someday get through all that laundry, I'd find, sort and appropriately fold all of my cloth inventory. Until then, I just chuckle knowing this conundrum was created solely by me and my desire to have a stylish place setting.