There is a particular look a set of mats takes on after a few washes. They no longer lie flat. The corners lift a little, one edge is longer than the other, and a runner that was rectangular has developed a gentle curve along its length. Nothing is torn and nothing is stained, but the set has stopped looking like a set. This is not wear in the ordinary sense. It is a construction problem showing up under water, and once you know how the things are built it becomes both predictable and, up to a point, reversible.
What a Place Mat Is Made Of
A mat is rarely a single piece of cloth. Most are at least two layers, a face and a backing, stitched around the edge, and a good many carry a third layer of wadding or stiffening between them to give the thing some body. Some are quilted through, which locks all three together at intervals, and some are joined only at the perimeter.
Those layers are frequently different materials. A linen face over a cotton backing is common. So is a cotton face over polyester wadding. Each material takes up water at its own rate, swells by its own amount and shrinks by its own amount as it dries, and none of that is a defect. It is simply what different fibres do.
The stitching around the edge is the constraint. It holds the perimeter of all the layers at one fixed length. Inside that boundary the layers are free to change size relative to one another, but they cannot change size relative to the edge, because the thread will not permit it. Everything that goes wrong follows from that single fact.
Runners have the same construction and a worse geometry. They are long and narrow, so a small percentage difference in shrinkage along the length turns into a visible quantity of cloth with nowhere to go. A mat can absorb a little unevenness without showing it. A runner puts the same unevenness on display along a metre of table.
What Soaks In and What Sits On Top
Food soil on a mat divides into two kinds that behave quite differently. Water soluble material, meaning sugar, salt, starch and most sauces, disperses into water readily and leaves with the wash. It is the kind of soil that comes out without anybody having to think about it, which is exactly why it is rarely the problem.
Oil and fat are the other kind, and they are what actually accumulates. Oil does not dissolve in water at all. It has to be surrounded by detergent molecules and carried off as a suspension, which needs both enough detergent and enough warmth to keep the fat liquid while that happens. A cool wash on a greasy mat leaves most of the grease where it was.
That leftover fat is invisible at first and it does not stay invisible. Oils oxidise slowly in contact with air and light, and the products of that reaction are yellow through to brown. A set of mats that has gradually gone the colour of weak tea has not been stained by anything in particular. It has been accumulating unremoved fat for several years.
Wax is a third category worth naming, because candles and mats end up on the same table. Wax on cloth is a solid rather than a liquid stain, and the way to remove a solid is mechanically. Harden it thoroughly, crack it and lift the pieces away, and only then deal with the thin residue left in the weave using heat and absorbent paper.
Why They Come Out Buckled
Put a mat with a linen face and a cotton backing into water and both layers swell. Linen takes up water more readily and swells more across its width than cotton does, so while it is wet the face is effectively larger than the back. The stitched edge holds them together, so the excess has to go somewhere, and it goes into a ripple in the middle.
Drying is when the ripple becomes permanent. As water leaves, the fibres shrink back, but they set into whatever position they happened to be holding while they dried. A mat dried in a heap or hanging from two corners sets into the shape of the heap or the shape of the pull. The fibres have no memory of what shape they used to be.
Heat makes this worse by finishing the job before the cloth has settled. In a hot dryer the surface dries while the interior is still damp, so the outer layer locks in its shape before the inner one has finished moving, and the two end up permanently out of agreement with one another.
Grain is the last factor. Cloth is dimensionally stable along its threads and stretchy on the diagonal, which is the bias. If a mat was cut even slightly off grain, the two directions shrink by different amounts and the rectangle quietly becomes a very shallow parallelogram. No amount of washing corrects that, though pressing can hide a surprising proportion of it.
Blocking a Mat Back to Square
Blocking is a technique borrowed from knitting and it is the only real answer to a warped mat. The principle is that wet fibre is plastic and dry fibre is not, so a piece of cloth held in a particular shape while it dries will keep that shape. You are not stretching the mat permanently. You are choosing the position it sets in.
In practice it means taking the mat out of the wash while it is still properly wet, laying it on a flat surface that will not mind the moisture, and easing it out to its correct dimensions by hand. Work opposite corners against each other, check the edges against something straight that you trust, then leave it alone until it is dry all the way through.
Weight helps wherever the cloth wants to lift. Anything flat and heavy laid along an edge will hold it down without marking it. What does not help is pinning through the cloth, which leaves holes in linen and concentrates the tension at a few points instead of spreading it along the edge where you actually want it.
The reason this works at all is the same reason the mat warped in the first place. Fibres set as they dry. That process is entirely indifferent to whether the shape you give them is the right one or the wrong one, so the whole skill lies in taking the trouble to give them the right one before they make their own choice.
Pressing Without Putting a Shine On
Shine on linen is not scorching. It is a change in how the surface reflects light. Linen fibre is irregular and slightly ridged, which scatters light and gives the cloth its characteristic matt look. Press it hard and hot and those ridges flatten into a smooth plane, and a smooth plane reflects in one direction, which the eye reads as a polished patch.
Two things cause it. Direct contact with a hot sole plate, and pressing cloth that is bone dry. Fibre holding a little moisture is pliable and springs back after the iron has passed over it. Fibre with no moisture in it simply deforms and stays deformed. That is why pressing a mat slightly damp gives a better result than pressing it dry with a burst of steam.
Press place mats from the reverse wherever you can. The face is the side that will be looked at and the side that catches the light, so put the iron on the back and let heat and moisture travel through the layers. Where the face has to be pressed directly, use a press cloth between the iron and the linen and accept that it takes longer.
Sizing is the hidden variable. Many table linens carry a starch or resin finish from the factory, and those finishes are what glaze most readily under a hot iron. If a mat has gone shiny in one patch and not another, an uneven finish is usually the culprit rather than the pressing. A wash with plenty of rinsing takes most of it out.
Store place mats flat if there is anywhere to put them, or rolled if there is not. Folding puts a sharp crease across the face, and a crease in a mat that has been pressed is a line the cloth will remember. Rolling spreads the bend across the whole surface, so nothing holds a tight angle for months.
Table Linen in New Orleans
New Orleans is humid for a large part of the year, and humidity changes how cloth behaves at rest. Linen and cotton both take moisture out of the air and give it back again, so a mat stored in a drawer here is never truly dry and never entirely stable. It shifts with the weather, which is why a set looks flat one month and not the next.
That same moisture is why storage matters more here than in a drier place. Cloth put away while even slightly damp stays damp, and cloth left folded under weight in humid air takes a crease far more readily than it would elsewhere. Air a set properly before it goes into a drawer, and give it room once it is in there.
The months ahead are the ones when table linen actually earns its keep. Through the holidays a table gets laid several times in a fortnight, mats and runners with it, so washing, drying and pressing follow one another far more closely than at any other point in the year. WaveMAX New Orleans has the drum space to do a full set together.
Getting the Set Ready
Mats, runners and napkins are a small load on their own and an awkward one in a domestic machine, because they want room to move and they come out better when they are not crammed against everything else. Doing a whole table set in one go also means every piece dries the same way, which is half the battle with warping.
The machines at our self-service laundry on Frenchmen Street take a full table set with room to spare, and room is what stops a mat folding against itself in the drum and setting a crease that then has to be pressed out by hand afterwards.
Our machines and the store are cleaned daily.
Our wash-dry-fold service covers the everyday laundry.
For general guidance, The American Cleaning Institute publishes a fabric care guide that is a useful cross-check.
The short version
A mat is layers of different cloth held at a fixed perimeter by stitching, and those layers swell and shrink by different amounts. That mismatch is what makes them buckle. Fibres set into whatever shape they hold as they dry, so pull a mat square while it is still wet and let it dry flat. Wash warm enough to lift fat, because fat left behind yellows over years. Press from the reverse, slightly damp, to avoid raising a shine.
WaveMAX New Orleans is at 4001 Frenchmen St, easy to reach from New Orleans and the surrounding area. If you have a load that will not fit at home, call us at 504-881-7239.