The ecofrugal way to make a bed (without fitted sheets)

Yesterday, I decided that the weather had become chilly enough to make it worth putting our warm comforter on the bed. (In the summer, we leave it off and use only the empty duvet cover.) Before doing this, I decided to wash the duvet cover and then, since I already had the bed stripped down partway, to change the sheets. I stripped off the plain cotton ones we'd been using for summer and prepared to replace them with the middle-weight flannel ones we use for fall before upgrading to extra-warm fleece in the winter. And then I remembered: we no longer have a complete set of flannel sheets. We still have the flat sheet and the pillowcases, but we had to discard the fitted sheet because the elastic wore out and it wouldn't stay on the bed anymore.

Thinking about it, I realized we've run into this problem with a lot of our sheet sets. One way or another, the fitted sheet goes kaput while the flat sheet and pillowcases are still good. Usually it's the elastic that fails, but sometimes the fabric just wears through. And even when the fitted sheet is still in good condition, it's sometimes unusable because it doesn't fit our mattress. Either it's too loose (because it's designed for one of those huge "pillow top" mattresses) and it shifts around, or it's too tight and can barely stretch over the mattress in the first place. Either way, it ends up popping off one corner—often in the middle of the night, leaving us lying on top of the bare mattress. Which kind of defeats the purpose of having a bottom sheet in the first place.

All this kind of makes you wonder why it's worth having fitted sheets at all. They didn't always exist; my dad recalls from back in his Army days that a standard "set" of sheets was three flat sheets, plus the pillowcase or cases. One flat sheet went on the bottom, one on the top, and the third was a spare. When it was time to change the sheets, you moved the top sheet to the bottom, put the clean sheet on top, and sent the dirty bottom sheet to the laundry. This is an eminently sensible system, since all three sheets get an equal amount of wear and you never have to wash more than one at a time. But with modern sheet sets—fitted sheet, flat sheet, and pillowcases—it's no longer possible.

I could accept this drawback as an acceptable trade-off if fitted bottom sheets were obviously superior to flat ones. But as I've already observed, they're just the reverse. They don't always fit, they wear out faster, and they're harder to repair. As Vice points out, sheets are most prone to wear out in the middle, a problem you can fix with a flat sheet by cutting it down the middle and sewing the two good edges together. The worn-out middle section becomes the edge and can be tucked under the mattress, letting you get a few more years of use out of the sheet. I admit most people nowadays probably wouldn't bother to do this, but with a fitted sheet, they don't even have the option.

In short, fitted bottom sheets are the exact opposite of ecofrugal (and hard to fold, to boot). And yet somehow, these clearly inferior sheets have become so ubiquitous that hardly anyone remembers it's possible to make a bed without one. And even those who know it's possible, like me, don't necessarily know how to do it. My mom taught me how to make a bed years ago, but the lesson started with putting on the fitted sheet, and I've never learned any other way of doing it.

Even the Internet provides little guidance on this matter. I've tried repeatedly to search for "How to make a bed with two flat sheets," but I all I could find was explanations of how to make a bed with two flat sheets on top of a fitted sheet. Even searches for "How to make a bed without a fitted sheet" kept giving me hits on how to make a bed with a fitted sheet, or even how to turn a flat sheet into a fitted one—exactly the opposite of what I asked for.

But yesterday, driven by my growing frustration with the failures of fitted sheets, I dug deeper into the results, knowing there must be a solution somewhere. And when I finally found one, it turned out to be something I already knew perfectly well: use hospital corners. 

My mom showed me how to do this as part of that long-ago lesson, but she did it with the top sheet, over top of the fitted sheet. She lined up the top edge of the sheet with the top of the mattress, tucked in the bottom edge, and then used hospital corners to hold it in place. And apparently, this is how most people even today use hospital corners, since most explanations of how to make them show them being placed over top of a fitted sheet. So it simply never occurred to me that if you put hospital corners on all four corners, top and bottom, it would hold a flat sheet down just as if it were a fitted one. 

Armed with this new knowledge, I decided to try making up our bed this time using two flat sheets: our orphaned flannel one and another orphaned one from one of our percale sheet sets. This proved to be a bit tricky, as apparently modern full-size sheets aren't really sized to cover an entire full-sized mattress from top to bottom. By centering the sheet very, very precisely on the mattress, I was able to give myself just enough material to tuck in the top and bottom edges, but there wasn't an inch to spare.

I then went around my precariously tucked sheet and made hospital corners on all four corners, top and bottom. I did this using a diagonal fold, the way my mom taught me all those years ago. But if you prefer a vertical pleat, this other YouTube video shows you to do it that way. The ever-so-posh British woman in the video says she makes a vertical pleat because she thinks a diagonal one "looks messy"; it's not clear whether it stays put any better on the mattress.

With the bottom sheet in place, I placed the flannel sheet on top. Since it only had to reach as far as the top of the mattress, I had a lot more fabric to tuck in at the foot of the mattress than I had with the bottom sheet. I did hospital corners on this one too, but at the bottom corners only; I'm hoping this well-tucked top sheet will help hold the bottom one in place.

We've now slept one night with the bed made up this way, and so far, the precariously tucked bottom sheet is staying put. If it can make it through a whole week, it'll be doing better than our fitted ones usually do. But even if it doesn't, I don't think it'll be an indication that this system of making a bed is faulty; the problem will more likely be that the sheet I used just wasn't big enough. I believe I've got a queen-size flat sheet (six inches longer than a double) tucked away in our cedar chest downstairs, so I'll try it again with that one before giving up on the technique.

Sadly, even if it works, I don't think I can switch over to using flat sheets exclusively. It's all right for summer, spring, and fall, but the fleece sheets we love so for wintertime appear to be available only as sets, with one flat sheet, two pillowcases, and a so-called fitted sheet that doesn't. But at least this method will allow us to keep using the orphaned top sheets from our existing sets when the fitted ones inevitably, prematurely give out.