How to Fold Clothes for Travel to Save Space Tutorial

In today's video, I'm going to show you how to turn this into this. This is the ranger roll, sometimes otherwise put as the army roll. And no, I was not in the army to learn this. I just learned it over time while traveling. And we have found this way of folding our clothes to be the most efficient way to save space in our suitcase. Also, it keeps our clothes super organized. One reason we really like this technique over some of the other folding techniques like the bundle method or just your classic fold is that with the ranger roll, I can use this folding technique across all pieces of clothing. So whether it's a pair of shorts or underwear or socks or sweatshirts or jeans, I can use the same fold across everything, which I really, really like. And I'm going to show you how to do that. Make sure you stick around to the end of the video as I'm going to share a little pro tip on how I deal with my dirty laundry while traveling. We all know it can be really difficult to get that dirty laundry back in your suitcase the way it came, as well as you don't want it touching your clean clothes. So I'm going to show you a solution to that problem, but that's enough talking. Let's get folding. We are going to start with a t-shirt. Personally, I think this is the easiest way to learn this folding technique on is on a t-shirt. So that's why we're starting here. The first step you're going to do, lay it flat on the ground or on a table or whatever you have. Then you're going to make a fold or crease at the bottom of the t-shirt. This is the most important step of the folding technique is making sure you have a good crease. If you're unsure of how big to make the crease, always air on the side of more crease. It'll make it easier at the end. Once you have the crease, you're going to start to fold the t-shirt in. So I start by tucking in a sleeve. I fold it halfway across. I'm going to do the same thing on the other side, folding it right on top. Then I'm going to turn the t-shirt around so the fold is on the opposite end. I'm going to then start rolling really tightly. I'm going to roll, roll, roll. Now, once you get to the end here, you're going to roll all the way to the end. And then you're going to see you have this little flap from the fold or crease that you made, and you're going to flip that over and it's going to hold this t-shirt nice and tight. And see, you can kind of toss it around, holds nice and tight in a nice compact roll. There is the t-shirt. Clothing item number two, and that is a pair of blue jeans. And as you can probably imagine, this piece of clothing is going to be a little bit more difficult and take a little bit more practice than the t-shirt. But essentially, the process is exactly the same, and it's going to start by making your fold or crease at the top of your jeans. Make sure they're buttoned, by the way. I'm going to do a nice big crease or fold. I have found that a bigger fold with thicker clothing items does a lot better, and it makes it a lot easier at the end of your folding process. So I make my big fold. I'm then going to turn my jeans around. From here, quite simple, I'm just going to fold on top of each other. The legs nice and long, and I'm going to start my roll. As you can see, this folding technique is maybe not the fastest way to fold your clothes, but that's not the point. The point is we are trying to save space. So I keep rolling nice and tight until I get up to the end. And again, I have this nice pocket that I'm going to flip over. Again, this one's a little bit more difficult, takes a little bit more patience. But flip it over, and boom, we have our jeans in a nice tight roll. Okay, now we have some underwear. If you can do the jeans, the underwear is no problem. We're going to start by making our fold. Boom. We're going to turn that fold away from us. Now, with my underwear, I actually do an extra fold, being that the material is quite thin. So I like to fold each leg in half, just like so, and then I'll fold it in half again. So it's kind of like three separate folds. I'm going to start my roll nice and tight, rolling all the way up. I now have my flap, and I'm going to work it around, and boom, I have my underwear. We have our socks. Start by laying them flat. Now, a little pro tip for you with the socks. What I like to do, if you can see here, I have about an inch stagger at the top. So I stack one just a touch lower, and this is going to allow me to fold it over at the end. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to start rolling from the toes, kind of pinching the two pairs of socks together on top of each other. I'm going to roll all the way up, and then because I left a little extra at the end on that first pair of socks, I just flip that pair over, and boom, we have our socks. A sweatshirt, the big daddy. Not sure why I said it like that, but if you can fold this sweatshirt in this technique, you can also fold almost any jacket in a similar fashion. This is going to be very similar to the blue jeans, being that it is quite a bit more bulky. I'm going to reverse my order a little bit with the sweatshirt. I'm going to start by tucking in the hood, just getting that out of the way, and then I'm going to pull in the sleeves nice and tight. Make sure they're flat to avoid wrinkles as much as possible. Okay, then I'm going to go ahead and make my fold. As a reminder, with the big bulky items, you want to make sure that you have a really nice big fold. That's going to allow the process to be much easier at the end. Okay, I have my nice big fold. I'm going to turn it around. From here, all I'm going to do is I'm going to fold my sweatshirt in half. Okay, I have my nice big crease. Fold in half. I'm going to start my nice tight roll, rolling all the way up to the end. I have my fold here. Fold it over. Again, similar to blue jeans, you got to work it a little bit, but then, boom, I have my nice tight sweatshirt roll. Now, even though I've had a lot of success with this ranger roll, I know there's tons of different folding and packing techniques out there, so let me know in the comments if there's a technique that I should be practicing and trying out for my next trip. I'm always willing to learn and try new things, especially if it's going to save me some space or just make me a more efficient traveler. With that being said, let's get into how I deal with dirty clothes while I travel. Start by getting yourself a laundry bag. This is going to be key in keeping the separation from your dirty clothes to your clean clothes. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. This bag actually just came in my luggage, but it can be a plastic bag, a garbage bag, really anything that's going to create that separation. For me, with my dirty clothes when I'm traveling, I basically do the exact opposite of what I do when I'm folding my clean clothes, which is the ranger roll. For dirty clothes, I will do no folding. My entire goal is to just make sure that my clothes lie flat. For example, I have a dirty t-shirt. I will do something that's very similar to a classic fold. I try not to handle it too much because usually it's going to be super dirty. All I'm trying to do is to just get it to lay flat, and then I will slide it in my dirty laundry bag. I will go through and do that with all of my dirty clothes, whether it's jackets, sweatshirts, shorts, underwear. I just make sure everything lays flat. The reason I do this is because most of the time when your clothes are dirty, you're not going to want to refold them up, and usually they don't get folded the same way they came out of the suitcase as you're putting them back in. Second of all, if you leave them unfolded when you get home, you can easily just take your laundry bag and dump that directly into the washing machine without having to handle any of the dirty clothes. There's nothing worse than folding up a sweaty pair or dirty pair of underwear, and then also when you get home, have to unfold it to wash it. I do as little folding as possible when I put it into this bag, so that way I can just dump it out when I get home. Hopefully, this little tip of having a laundry bag, as well as just making sure all of your laundry, your dirty laundry, lies flat, helps you manage it a bit better, as well as keep it so that it can all still fit within your suitcase. Typically, what I'll do is with my dirty laundry bag, I'll just lie it right on top of my clean clothes, but it's okay because I have this separation from my laundry bag. Hopefully, this video gave you a better idea of how to execute the ranger role, and hopefully will help you save space in your suitcase for your next trip. If you enjoyed this video, I would also consider watching the video we made about how I travel with just one bag for weeks. It really goes into a lot more of these efficiency packing tips, and you might want to check it out. Thanks for watching this video. If you enjoyed it and found it valuable, please give it a thumbs up, as well as subscribe to our channel for more content like this. We will see you in the next video.