Tips for choosing dish towels

The right choice of dish towel fabric and colour goes a long way to setting the tone of your kitchen or dining room. Choose table linens, napkins and dish towels that offer a warm welcome to both family and guests.

Select your tablecloth and napkins according to the occasion — a formal celebration calls for a different table setting than a family dinner or a kid's birthday party.

In some ways, the humble dish towel is the unsung hero of the kitchen; you use them countless times every day, for drying dishes and handling pots. As well as soaking up water and spills, they also harbour bacteria and should be washed regularly. Nowadays you can buy them in a great variety of colours and fabrics, so that you can find a towel (or three) to fit in with virtually any decor, need and taste. As with all things, the different fabrics used for dish towels have widely varying characteristics, and some work better than others.

• Cotton dish towels are the cheapest option, but they tend not to be the best choice. For one thing, they don't dry especially well, and they often start to smell after a while. Even several washings may not eliminate the odour, so consider the cotton dish towel a last choice.
• Linen or half-linen dish towels are absorbent, and they dry thoroughly without shedding lint onto your sparkling glasses. They tend to be very durable, although they need to be washed a few times before first use in order to work their best.
• Microfibre dish towels are a more modern solution that will absorb up to five times as much water as an ordinary dish towel. They also dry very rapidly after use. Microfibre is made from a blend of tiny nylon and polyester strands that are woven together. The only downside to microfibre: people with very dry skin or eczema might find that microfibre towels can be annoyingly clingy and irritating to their skin.
• Avoid chemical fabric softeners, since these leave a coating on the towel that keeps it from drying dishes properly. Try using white distilled vinegar as a softener instead. It has the additional advantage of eliminating unpleasant odours, even in cotton towels.

Tip: Always wash dish towels in 90°C (200°F) water before using them.

Here is a quick tutorial on napkin folding. Give the "Lily" fold a try for your next get-together:

1. Fold a napkin into a triangle. Then turn the right and left corner up to the upper tip to form a square again.
2. Now fold up two-thirds of the lower tip and then back down again to the bottom line. The top must not be longer than the bottom piece or else the folded napkin will be prone to tipping over.
3. Now fold the napkin together by folding back the left and the right side to the rear, and tucking one tip into the fold of the other. Round out the shape by hand.
4. Turn down both upper corners (the leaves of the lily).