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Folding T-Shirts as if by Magic

I am in the middle of my every-eight-or-nine-months-whether-I-need-it-or-not T-shirt laundry. I have over 250 T-shirts in active rotation, and I'm obsessive (and lazy) enough to want to get through wearing essentially all of them before I do the laundry. One downside of this (aside from the need to own more hampers than most large families) is that when the laundry comes, it comes on big. So far, I've done about nine large loads, and I estimate that there are still another five to go.

The most tedious part of the process, of course, is not the washing or drying, but the folding. And folding. And folding. Thus my great interest when, while playing games Saturday night, our friends Dean and Stephanie mentioned T-shirt origami, a very cute technique for folding a T-shirt neatly in a quick and initially baffling set of motions.

This has, as was obvious in retrospect, been blogged many times, but it was so new and relevant to me that I couldn't resist.

(By the way, after extensive research, I have determined that, while much cooler, the origami technique is neither as fast nor as convenient in result as my standard approach. Hold up the shirt with thumb and forefinger by the shoulder seams with the front facing you, then use the other fingers to fold the sides in; finally, swing the bottom of the shirt away from you, setting it down on the table as you do so, and complete the fold. With a little practice, this goes very quickly indeed...)