Efficient Clothes Folding: Tips for Better Organisation at Home

Folding clothes might seem like the most mundane part of laundry, but doing it well makes a real difference to how your wardrobe looks, how long clothes stay wrinkle-free, and how easy it is to find what you’re looking for. Here are our favourite efficient folding techniques.

Fold While Clothes Are Still Warm

The best time to fold is immediately after removing clothes from the dryer, while the fabric is still warm. Heat-set wrinkles in fabric as it cools, so clothes folded flat and neatly while warm stay wrinkle-free much longer than clothes folded after they’ve cooled in a pile.

The Shirt Fold

For t-shirts and casual shirts: lay flat, fold one side in a third of the way, fold the sleeve back over the body, repeat on the other side, fold the bottom third up to the collar. This gives a neat, compact rectangle that stacks well.

The File Fold (KonMari Method)

For drawers, the file fold — where items are folded into small rectangles and stored vertically rather than stacked — is transformative. You can see every item in a drawer at a glance, items don’t get disturbed when you retrieve one, and the drawer holds more. Try this for t-shirts, underwear, socks, and casual wear.

Hanging vs. Folding

Items that benefit from hanging rather than folding: dress shirts and blouses (hangers eliminate ironing if hung immediately after drying), trousers (folded on the crease and hung), dresses, jackets, and anything that creases badly when folded.

Items that fold better than they hang: knitwear (hanging stretches knits out of shape), t-shirts, jeans, casual clothing, underwear, and socks.

Matching and Rolling Socks

Sort socks immediately after drying — when they’re all together in the laundry basket, not after you’ve unpacked everything else. The simplest matching method: sort by colour first, then match pairs and roll them together (don’t ball them by stretching one inside the other — this damages the elastic over time). Rolling socks keeps pairs together in the drawer without the elastic-stretching of the traditional ball method.

Folding at the Love Wash Laundromat

One of the advantages of folding at the laundromat itself — on our folding tables, while clothes are still warm from the dryer — is that your laundry arrives home already neat and organised. You just need to put it away. Many Love Wash regulars swear by this approach and say it makes unpacking take under five minutes.