Buried in cup towels

Mama's kitchen is not organized for cooking. Slowly but surely over the past year, I have been cleaning out the various nooks and crannies and trying to reorganize things. While I have covered most of the territory available, I still have a few crannies to go. In truth, I despair of ever having enough storage space or any efficiency in food prep.

My latest adventure was to clean out the cup towel drawers. Mama has only one more drawer in her kitchen than I do, but hers are deeper and all in one column. Mine (3) are shallow and scattered about the kitchen. Still I have drawer envy both for number and for depth.

After getting the new supply of kitchen utensils from Next Door Cousin, I needed a place to store them. The utensil drawer is jam packed and so is the counter top container that holds essential items like wooden spoons and such. The only choice was to start clearing out some cup towels. I had no idea what I was getting into.

Three drawers were smash jammed with towels. One had as much miscellaneous junk as it did towels, and one had quite a few aprons (who uses those nowadays?). But all three drawers were overflowing with faded terry cup towels. As you know, I no longer used terry towels at home. (Indeed, it would seem that some of my own old terry towels wound up in Mama's kitchen drawers.) Whatever I might use, I did not think that I needed that many towels as much as I needed the space.

My first step was to throw them all in the washing machine. Actually, it took four loads and twice as many dryer loads to get them all done. In truth, I still have one that is mostly aprons yet to go. I was well and truly sick of cup towels by the time I got through washing, sorting, folding, and storing them.

Among the observations:

• Mama had a lot of Christmas towels and aprons.
• Mama showed a marked preference for towels that tied to the drawer handles. These were more ragged and faded than some of the others.
• A lot of her towels had hand-crocheted work, some of it, at least, done by my late Aunt G. But which ones?

I now have room for more utensils (a good thing), but have not yet had the courage to tackle the junk in the bottom drawer (a cowardly thing). I am also left with an abundance of perfectly good toweling with faded images. What to do with it?

One suggestion is to make sure that My Prince has as many as he needs for working around the garage. Will do. Another discovery is that the towels make nice jewelry rolls for the necklaces that I have been making. Will use more of them. But there are still a bunch that we won't be able to use that way. Any suggestions?