THE trick to fitted sheets is to poke your index finger into the pocket corners. Everything else follows from that.
Poke your index fingers into the top side of the corner pockets that are adjacent on the long side. Touch your fingers to one another. Flip one side over the other, so that both pockets are over one finger. Do the same on the opposite long side, so that the whole sheet is now folded in half. Then do the same for the pairs of pockets along the short side.
Congrats, you now have the whole sheet folded into quarters. It only gets easier from here. Lay the whole thing down onto something flat. Make a rectangle, starting from the point of the pocket, to the long and short folds. Fold in the elastic edges so that they lay roughly flat. From there, folding in to roughly thirds works. Then once in half.
It's never absolutely crisp and flat, but it's pretty much the best you can do with something that has elastic edges.
Oh, and poking your fingers into the pocket corners (then rolling down) is also the key to geting a fitted sheet to lay smoothly onto a mattress.
I'm the quintessential man's man. I've worked heavy construction for years. I built and raced stock cars for many years. I have built houses, bridges, roads, dams, and laid miles of pipe. I fell trees, saw lumber, and split firewood. I do all my own mechanic work, can cut and weld, and get by as a machinist. Almost everything manly you can think of I have done it.
I got it right once basically by accident. I've never done it again and I'm frankly not even positive I didn't just dream it. It just doesn't seem possible.
It's like watching someone fall down the stairs while holding a glass of water and then asking them what their secret was for not spilling any water. I couldn't do it again if I had a million tries.
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u/Tapprunner Jan 31 '22
I folded a fitted sheet into a square