7 Other Ways to Use Your Kitchen Towels
Square-shaped tea towels (like my Chroma Rex kitchen towels!) are the perfect size & shape to use for more than just drying dishes & hands. Here's how to make the most of them all year round:
1. Storing Veggies in the Fridge
Instead of keeping your carrots, cucumbers, and leafy greens in thin plastic bags, transfer them to your refrigerator drawers lined with cotton towels (Geometric Ferns design shown here). These will enable moisture to absorb into the towels and then evaporate, keeping veggies from becoming slimy and then moldy.
2. Wear as a Bandana
Keeps you cooler than a scarf in the winter, warmer than a bandana in the spring & fall, and when rolled several times before tying (as shown with the Rhody kitchen towel), you can wet the rolled portion with water to keep yourself cool in the summer heat too! And you'll never be without a napkin, towel, or personal-size picnic blanket either.
3. Pet Bandana or Cape
Roll it to the right length, and then tie over their shoulders for an adorable, expressive accessory. Dog photo: Jungle Cat Greenhouse mascot Tango, in Dumpling print; Cat photo: Juliann Choe's cat in Pacific Northwest Green
4. Reusable Gift Wrap
You don't need to be an expert at tying furoshiki (traditional Japanese cloth wrapping) to gift things in a sustainable material! My cotton towels are digitally printed with eco-friendly inks, so there's no plasticized screenprinting or block-printing ink on the surface, ensuring that it not only stays nicely absorbent where printed, but it remains easy to fold and tie as well (+biodegradable!). My go-to is overlapping 2 corners, and then tying the other 2. Here's a nifty how-to video on my Instagram account, for reference.
Rhody, Southwest & PNW Green towels shown here:
5. Bathroom Hand Towel
Who says bathroom towels should only be those bulky cotton terry ones? Thin flour sack cotton ones absorb water quickly and dry faster than those bulky towels, and when folded to fit, have many different layers to help dry clean hands.
6. Drying Windows & Counters
Ya know how flour sack cotton towels are wonderful because they leave no lint on your dishes? That makes them suitable for quickly drying all kinds of other things around your house as well - windows, kitchen & bathroom counters, faucets, glass stove tops, even glass shower doors. Toss it in the washer afterward, and it'll be ready for more tasks at again soon enough.
7. Cloth Napkin
These towels fold up tiny, so they're perfect for stashing in a desk drawer as a cloth napkin for lunch/snack breaks!
