Some cloths work hard and some barely work at all. The good one for the big table falls into the second group, out of the cupboard three or four times a year and back in again by the following morning. That sounds like an easy life for a piece of fabric, and it is not. Eleven months folded in the dark does more visible harm than eleven months in regular use, and the damage arrives in two forms that look unrelated but are not. There is the line down the middle that will not press out, and there is the slow drift towards a dull yellow.
Why a fold line refuses to come out
Cotton and linen are cellulose, and cellulose fibres hold their shape through hydrogen bonds between the long molecules inside them. Bend a fibre and those bonds break and reform in the new position. That is all a crease really is: a fold held long enough for the internal structure of the fibre to settle into it and treat it as normal.
Time and pressure are what make it permanent. A cloth folded into a drawer for eleven months has the weight of everything above it pressing on a single line, and the bonds along that line have had the better part of a year to settle. The fibre is not damaged by this. It has simply been persuaded that folded is its natural state.
Water and heat persuade it back. Steam breaks those hydrogen bonds by getting water molecules in between them, and an iron then flattens the fibre and holds it there while the water leaves and the bonds reform in the flat position. This is why ironing a bone dry cloth achieves so little, and why a slightly damp one presses beautifully.
It also explains the one crease that never quite goes. Where a cloth has been folded along the same line every year, the fibres at the fold have been flexed thousands of times and some of them have broken. A broken fibre leaves a visible pale line that no amount of steam will restore, which is the whole argument for never folding the same way twice.
Where storage yellowing comes from
Yellowing in stored linen is almost never dirt that was visible when it went away. It is the slow oxidation of things that were not. Sugar from a spilled drink, a trace of oil from a serving dish, starch left in the weave from the last press: all of them darken over months as they react with oxygen in the air around them.
Sugar is the usual offender because it dries clear. A splash of wine or juice rinses to nothing in appearance, leaves the sugars behind in the weave, and those sugars slowly brown in exactly the way sugar browns in a pan, only over a year rather than a minute. The mark that appears is in the shape of a spill nobody remembers making.
Storage materials contribute as well. Cardboard and untreated wood give off faintly acidic vapours as they age, and cellulose yellows in acidic conditions. A cloth kept in a cardboard box or laid on a bare pine shelf will often be noticeably darker along whichever edge was in contact with the material.
Plastic makes a different mistake. A sealed bag holds whatever moisture was in the cloth when it went in and gives it nowhere to escape, so the fabric spends the year very slightly damp. Damp cellulose oxidises faster than dry cellulose, and the cloth comes out both yellowed and smelling of the cupboard it was in.
Wash it properly before it goes away
The most useful piece of tablecloth care happens at the end of the evening rather than at the start of the next one. Everything that is going to yellow over the coming year is sitting on the cloth now, and most of it will come out easily today with nothing more exotic than detergent and a long cycle.
Run it long and rinse it hard. A large cloth carries a lot of soil across a lot of surface, and for once the rinse matters more than the wash: detergent left in the weave is itself a source of yellowing, because the optical brighteners in it break down over time and go dull. An extra rinse is never wasted on a cloth heading into storage.
Deal with the spills you cannot see. Anywhere a glass stood, anywhere a dish sat, is worth pre-treating even if nothing shows at all. Cold water first on anything sugary, because heat sets it, and then a normal wash at whatever temperature the fibre will comfortably take without shrinking.
Make sure it is completely dry before it goes anywhere. Linen and cotton feel dry long before they are, because the fibre holds water inside where your hand cannot feel it. A cloth that is dry at the edges and goes straight into a bag carries that residual moisture with it for the whole of the year ahead.
Drying and pressing a large cloth
Large cloths dry badly in a small dryer for a simple geometric reason. They fold in on themselves, trap a wet core and tumble as a rope, so the outside overdries while the middle stays damp. Overdried linen goes brittle and creases harder afterwards, which is the opposite of what the cloth needs before a year on a shelf.
Press it damp. Take the cloth out while it still feels cool to the hand, and iron from the centre outwards so the fabric is pushed flat rather than dragged into ripples. On damask, press the reverse first: the pattern is made by threads running in different directions and catching the light, and a hot iron flattening the face dulls that effect permanently.
Work on a long surface if you have one. A cloth pressed in small sections on a narrow board ends up with a faint grid of lines where the sections met, because each pass reforms the fibre at a slightly different angle to the last. Moving the cloth steadily in one direction along a longer board avoids the problem altogether.
Let it cool flat before it is moved. Cellulose is still soft while it is warm and damp from the iron, and the bonds that hold the new flat shape are only fully formed once the fibre has dried and come back to room temperature. A cloth folded straight off the board takes a fresh crease in the place you have just removed one.
Rolling and putting it away
Rolling beats folding, and it beats it for the reason set out above. A roll spreads the bend over a wide curve instead of concentrating it on a single line, so no part of any fibre is sharply flexed. A cardboard tube wrapped in a clean cotton sheet, or simply the cloth rolled around a spare pillowcase, does the job perfectly well.
If it must be folded, fold it differently each year and lay a sheet of clean cotton or acid free tissue inside each fold. The tissue keeps the two faces of the cloth from pressing directly against each other and takes some of the sharpness out of the crease that forms.
Store it in cotton, on a shelf, in a room that stays at a reasonably steady temperature. A pillowcase makes a perfectly good bag and lets air move through the fabric. Keep it off bare wood and out of cardboard, and give it a shake and a refold partway through the year if the thought happens to occur to you.
Tables in Southgate as the season turns
Southgate winters are long and the heating runs for months, which dries indoor air considerably. Dry air pulls moisture out of stored cellulose and leaves the fibres more brittle, so a cloth that has spent a winter in a warm cupboard creases harder the following spring than one kept somewhere cooler and steadier would have done.
The other half of the year does the opposite. Through the warm damp months a cupboard on an outside wall can sit at a humidity the cloth will happily absorb, and that absorbed moisture is what feeds the yellowing described above. A steady middling spot beats either extreme, even when it is the less convenient place to keep things.
Most households get the cloth out for the run into the holidays, look at the fold line and decide to live with it. Good tablecloth care is mostly storage care, and storage care starts with a cloth that has been washed and pressed at a proper size rather than wrestled through a small drum and a short board.
Room for the big cloth
A cloth for a full table is simply too large for most domestic drums. Packed in, it cannot move, so the wash water never properly reaches the middle and the rinse never clears it. A machine with room to spare washes the whole surface evenly and spins it without pressing in a fresh set of creases along the way.
The machines at our self-service laundry on Fort Street take a cloth that seats ten without folding it into a lump, which means the weave opens properly in the water, the detergent reaches all of it, and what comes out needs pressing rather than rescuing.
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
The fold line is hydrogen bonding in cellulose settling into a shape held for a year, and steam with a warm iron reverses it unless the fibres at the fold have actually broken. Yellowing comes from invisible sugars and oils oxidising in storage, so the wash before it goes away matters far more than the one after it comes out. Roll rather than fold, store in cotton, and keep it away from cardboard.
WaveMAX Southgate is at 13248 Fort Street, easy to reach from Southgate and the surrounding area. If you have a load that will not fit at home, call us at 734-258-8026.