Keeping Sheets Wrinkle Free

One of my favorite questions we get asked, usually starts out with: "I used to have a sheet set that never wrinkled, I've used it for 20 years. Do you sell sheet sets that are also wrinkle free?" To address this, and similar questions, we'll cover the elements that can produce the fewest wrinkles in sheeting.

Fabric Content

Most sheets are typically made with cotton or polyester. Alternative sheet fabrics include silk, performance fabrics such as TENCEL, and a few others. The natural material of cotton can be woven in pairings that may include percale, sateen, and twill. Because cotton fabrics have always tended to wrinkle easily, improvements have been made in recent years; where form and weaving methods now produce cottons with fewer wrinkling. Polyester is a very wrinkle-free friendly fabric with a reputation for holding up well. Polyester, however, tends to be abrasive, produce skin irritations, and can feel excessively warm against the skin. Fortunately, the combining of cotton with polyester in sheeting has become the optimum happy medium and solution, offering folks the feel of cotton while possessing the wrinkle-resistant polyester element. When shopping in stores you may see terms like ‘cotton rich’; this means that the fabric contains a higher percentage of cotton when blended with polyester. In the past dozen years, high performance fabrics like TENCEL Lyocell (a natural and synthetic blended fabric) offers all the benefits of cotton poly sheeting, including excellent moisture wicking and an amazingly silky smooth tactile feature (an excellent choice for those with eczema and psoriasis).

Fabric Finishing

Sheeting fabrics that have chemical topical treatments applied to them basically offer a slicker feel, while reducing sheet wrinkling. The downside of these chemically treated fabrics is that they can cause ongoing potential skin irritations. You can typically find chemical treatments on cotton fabrics, while polyester fabrics don't require the same treatment to minimize wrinkling. High performance sheeting materials like TENCEL Lyocell also don't require chemical treatments because the components are naturally wrinkle resistant.

Fabric Care and Treatment

At DOWNLITE we would recommend that sheets never be left in the dryer (once finished) for a long period of time. Removing sheets quickly from the dryer, along with some quick folding, will keep your sheet wrinkles to a minimum.

So what sheeting do we recommend? Our choice recommendation of sheeting material for customers are the TENCEL Lyocell cotton blends. These fabrics give the desirable elements of minimal wrinkling, with a soft to the touch finish. We like to remind customers this fabric also should not be left in the dryer for an extended periods of time, to minimize wrinkles.

Of course if you are really neurotic about exiling wrinkles out of your sheets, you could invest in a rotary iron like the Miele B990E Rotary Iron to eliminate unsightly wrinkles from sheets.

Learn more about the benefits of TENCEL bedding from our video: Why Buy Tencel Lyocell Bedding