Wash on Monday - antique and vintage hand towels in the powder room

Chalk this up to one of those things I think about:

Powder room hand drying. Just hear me out.

For a while, I used to put out two (usually) pretty linen hand towels. They would either hang on a bar or would just be laid out next to the sink. This is a perfectly Southern thing to do. We've all washed our hands in a thousand powder rooms outfitted with two pretty hand towels.

The only problem with this scenario? We've all been there. You know what I'm talking about. You wash your hands and then get ready to dry them and you see those pristine linen or cotton towels hanging there and hate to sully them. You reluctantly try to gingerly dab your hands dry, knowing that someone else will have to come behind you and use them after you.

Or perhaps they've already been sullied... and are just hanging there, crumpled and damp. Nobody wants to dry their hands on that. Drying your hand on a damp towel feels like a way to transfer germs once bacteria starts growing on those clammy linens. It's simply a little icky.

You can choose from one of two solutions to fix that problem.

The first is to offer individual paper towels that each guests disposes of after one use. You can buy these prepacked all over the place. In the past, I have ordered monogrammed paper hand towels from Caspari.

They are a great option but I've run out of mine. I might go back to them at some point, but for now, I'm really quite taken with the second solution:

Like the paper towels, I offer a stack of linen or cotton hand towels for individual use. You know how I love to collect vintage and antique linens with handwork from estate sales.... well, the thought crossed my mind that if I got enough of them, I could entertain a large group and would have enough for everyone to take a fresh one. Brilliant solution!

In order to make this work, I salt the pot by putting one hand towel in the waste basket in the powder room at the beginning of my party so that people know they are to take one, use it and drop it in the bin for me to wash. I buy colored ones and white ones. Some are monogrammed, some have needlework flowers and some are completely plain. It doesn't matter. Sometimes I put out just a stack of all white hand towels and sometimes I add in some colors. It's completely up to you.

For me, these are the best option for several reasons.

The first is that there is no need to spend a lot of money on them. Estate sales are usually the best place to buy them and you shouldn't pay over $1 each. The Caspari ones are also about $1 each and they aren't reusable. If you use the linen ones for only one round of entertaining, you are automatically saving money.

The second reason is that they appeal to the tree hugger in me. If you are ecologically inclined, these seem like a better choice. I wash them by tossing them in with whatever other wash I'm running. I don't consider these "working" linens precious. If one ever gets ruined, it can become a kitchen hand towel until it's beyond use. You've saved a bit of tree.

Finally, and perhaps most important for those of us that consider beauty, they are so lovely and striking en masse.

They'll take a little more time, what with the washing and the ironing after the fact... but that's also part of their charm. Your guests will know that you are spending that time on the hand towels for them.

So get out there and start buying them up. Estate sales, sadly, are practically giving them away these days, even here in the South.

And I'll be right there to scoop them up!

XoxoL