My preferred technique is to also start with the cover inside out. Then put your hands inside the cyber into its corners. Then grasp two corners of the duvet through the fabric. A bit of shaking to turn the cover the right way out and you are done.
Grab any 1950's "how to be a good housewife" book, use a bit of scripting to replace "housewife" with "housekeeper" and "husband" with "partner", and republish.
I never had a duvet until the late 70's. I had heard that Swedes slept under duvets, but we had to settle for blankets and sheets. I ws envious! Well, we did have what we called "eiderdowns", which were like duvet inners, but lined in a heavy satin. But they were used as throws for extreme weather; you still slept between sheets and blankets.
I think my parents' generation viewed duvets as unacceptably decadent, and thought all children should learn to fold hospital corners[0] to build character.
I must also add that duvets were created for cold rooms and they're great for that: feeling so cozy warm when your nose is still chilled... However you get them as only choice in mostly any hotel nowadays, which also heat the rooms at 22C or more, so sweating and a general sleeping discomfort is guaranteed. Or shortly put: I hate you hotels with duvets.
Would also highly recommend! It's not quite exactly a practical handbook, and doesn't cover topics such as duvet cover changing, but it is considerably more relevant than most popular science/mathematics books. The very first chapter, for instance, covers the idea of explore/exploit choices, and does so in a way that is both general enough to be genuinely useful in everyday life (at least at a conceptual level) and mathematically rigorous enough not to throw you off should you want to read further.
I taught my mother how to fold a fitted sheet. A girlfriend taught me and I was floored at how elegant it is. Prior to that, they just made me angry and ended up in the closet in a wad.
This is what I do. I take a corner of the inner and stuff it into the outer until I find the corner of the outer. Then I try to keep those two corners in place while I do the same with the other corner. Then I grab both corners from the outside and do a lot of vigourous shaking until everything lines up. It takes ages and doesn't always work. I think I will try starting inside out from now on.
IME neither inside out nor the method you describe work well and both are tedious. Inside out does not work well, because the cover doesn't obey gravity and refuses to fall down to cover the duvet completely. It is a secret power of bed sheet covers. That, or it has to do with other things like friction.
I do a modified version: I put all the corners in the right places, then a good shake by holding two adjacent corners straightens everything out. May not work so well for duvets much wider than your arm span.
I do that and while the shaking is unpredictable and often requires doing it from multiple sides, I find it a strong but strangely pleasant exercise for my shoulders.
The rolling method is really exactly the same thing, but some people find it easier to think about reaching in for the corners after rolling, and you don't need to be tall enough to let it fall down into place (wife is 5'4" and rolls, I'm 6'4" and just reach for the far corners).
If the cover is not already inside out, then grab two duvet corners in on hand and pass to one cover corner (inside the cover ofc.) use your free hand to pinch cover corner and one of the duvet corner from the outside. Now place the remaining corner inside the cover(keep pinching the other corner). Pull your arm out, pinch this corner, shake to align.
I used to do the shove it in and frantically thrash until it take shape. Then I learnt this system and it is much easier. For a king size: maybe just get someone to help.
Yeah, I don't think there's a need for the roll. You just need to make sure you can hold it high enough in the air to shake the thing without letting the bottom rest on the floor.
I just think of it like a really big pillow case. I put the pillow case on inside out so I do the same for the duvet cover.
I don't remember where I picked this up either, but I do remember it caused an ex girlfriend to get irrationally angry and tell me I was doing it wrong... that's when I knew she wasn't a keeper!
As a short person, my strategy is to stand on the bed for extra height for this method. Or just be lazy and accept the slightly uneven distribution, which works itself out after the first night anyway.
I discovered this method in the early 80s as a kid on French TV.
There was a program with Jacques Martin about "incredible" stuff. I remember a hairdresser who used a flame and J Martin almost agreed to try, another one about the world record in going back and forth through a door.
That one was the world record in how many duvets you can handle in a given time IIRC.
Note that this was 80, 81 or around that. This was the only source for such stuff in France so it was a big show (for children at least)
That works but it is hard to use that technique on king size duvet. I essentially use the technique described in the article by starting with the cover turned inside out on top of duvet, tying all corners and then reaching through the cover opening for the far side and pulling it in instead of rolling and unrolling.
I always change the sheets in our house because my partner absolutely hates doing it. I recently realised this is because she has dramatically less upper-body strength than me, the "bit of shaking" is pretty exhausting for her with our heavy winter duvet. So this technique could be really useful for people with her build!
I use the same method. Although when reaching into the cover to its corners, I sometimes put my head in too. I stand up like some sort of inverted-duvet covered ghost and give the dog a fright. Then I continue the process again.
Yeah when I read this, I thought the step of tying all the corners seemed more than necessary. You only have to hold two of the corners and pull/shake.
The shaking part requires a lot of upper body strength that not everyone has. I can get a nice whip-snap out of a down comforter on a double bed but not a king. I ended up with a new synthetic comforter on the double and can barely make the far end rustle now because it weighs like 5 times as much.
WTF!?
I heard before that putting a cover on a duvet was a thing, a problem, a mystery...
are ppl making this up? is this a joke I don't get
invert, tie corners together and what not...
my family and everyone i know do it the way @pablobaz describes it.
it's simple and effective. change sheets whenever you feel like doing it, because its easy and fast...
endof story
In terms of cultural knowledge, it does seem like certain things were taken for granted by previous generations and not handed down in ways that younger generations can manage.
It's how I do it but we have a very large and heavy duvet; this technique (that my mom showed me once and I then promptly forgot) is a lot less impactful, since the shaking kinda requires you to lift and shake the whole thing.
I was never taught this, but I ended up "reinventing" it a few decades ago, certainly because this is the most efficient way ? I have always used this technique since.
Yeah, this is exactly how I do it except I don’t even bother to turn anything inside out. Just place the two “far” corners of the inner all the way into the corners of the cover, then grip the corners firmly and shake until everything finds its place. Easy.
The shaking also has the effect of fluffing up the down/feather filling nicely and distributing it evenly, which you should do once in a while if you have a non-synthetic duvet.
The rolling technique described in the article just seems ridiculous, way too much work!
While it was quaint to read through the high effort blog post, it was like reading a cooking blog that starts off with reminiscing about travels through an Italian village where they learnt how to make toast.
” Imagine replacing your duvet cover in minutes”
When i was 18 and begun my career I hospitality, we’d change a twin bed completely in like 3-4 minutes. How do you spend minutes with just one duvet (excluding disabilities but that’s quite obvious).
Also, this is why Swedish duvet covers have holes in the upper corners, just reach through them and grab the liner and pull it in, shake a bit, and you’re done.
I can think of lots of reasons. My double bed is in the corner of a small room so I only have access to one side of it. Lifting the mattress to put on a fitted sheet is very awkward and pretty strenuous. This also means that there isn't much room for laying out both a duvet and duvet cover. Typically I lay them both on the bed at the same time because I don't want either to touch the floor which makes inserting the duvet into the cover even more awkward. Next is the fact that a double sized duvet is almost but not quite square. It's quite easy to grab a corner of the duvet and match it with the wrong corner of the cover. Lastly, I only do this about once a week not 10 times a day so I haven't had a need to find a better method so far.
Ours is against three walls - you can only access the bed from the foot. It’s also four feet up in the air as we put a closet under the bed.
Turns out you can put on a fitted sheet while you’re on the bed really easily - just lift the head, bending the mattress and the corners in slightly, get the corners on, then off you hop and pull the corners onto the foot - takes 30 seconds at most, and there’s no walking around or lifting the entire mattress.
> Also, this is why Swedish duvet covers have holes in the upper corners, just reach through them and grab the liner and pull it in, shake a bit, and you’re done.
Just as an FYI, this is going away. At least IKEA stopped doing this. From what I heard, people complained thinking the holes were made in error. Stupidity wins again.
I do it in fifteen seconds at most, stuffing it without any consideration just keeping two corners in one hand, then matching them with two cover's corners and gently shaking.
Also genuinely baffled about the article, but to be honest, not the first time that I hear someone hating the procedure and describing some problem that I don't understand.
Maybe 30s here, but I'm not claiming to be the fastest; I'm wondering if body length is a factor. As a somewhat tall person (189cm) in my 50s I never had any issues changing doona covers.
Had a much shorter girlfriend at one point who simply said "that's not fair" when she saw me do it.
The arm reach factor - I can stretch a queen size duvet tight, holding corner to corner. (AU Queen = 210cm X 210cm).
For fitting, standing up I'll just feed one corner of the doona into the cover and find a corner to pinch, then the same for the other side - then open wide, and shake it out.
It so easy, which is why I was also baffled to see an article about making this easier to do.
(It's a small thing and it doesn't matter at all, but the ex seemed to notice it.)
I guess I’ve been lucky in which duvets and liners I have met in my life. Only time I’ve met opposition is with flannel covers, but those are just horrible in all other ways except for starting fires.
Not quite, but the liners are some 20 years. Changed and washed twice a year in 90 degrees and still fresh.
Save for the buttons that fell victim to our stone mangle, the covers of the same age are as new as well. That said, none of them are ikea, it’s sort of work place injury from the hotel business to use high quality linen.
I am generally what one would consider an intelligent person in most respects (university professor doing research in STEM involving plenty of math, etc.) but for some reason, I am totally unable to understand how this technique works.
I can follow the instructions, I know that it works, and I have a vague, superficial idea of why it's plausible for it to work (something like "things are inverted twice so it turns out OK") but I am unable to make a mental model of exactly how and why it works.
I find this quite annoying because it also makes me forget the technique every time (typically I remember things because I understand them, and I don't understand this... for me, the correct way to do it is equally plausible as other alternatives, so I forget the correct steps). I do it together with my wife and she always has to give me detailed step-by-step instructions as if I were a kid, and I think she thinks I'm trolling her because for her it's obvious, but I'm not trolling.
It's funny how one's mind can have weaknesses of this kind. (Related to the same weakness, I also get confused and spend a few seconds thinking when a sweater has its sleeves outside in or when I have to recover something from a coat pocket with the coat hanging, sometimes I actually put on the coat to avoid thinking about where the pocket is, but the duvet replacing thing is the most extreme manifestation because not even by stopping and thinking can I understand how it works).
Imagine this way. You have three papers stack together. The top paper is the duvet. The bottom two paper are the cover. If you flip the bottom page over the other two papers, you have the duvet paper between the cover pages. For the real cover, you can not do that because the three sides are stitched together. So you roll the them together then you can invert through the opening.
Thanks for the explanation. I’m with you up until that last part. Maybe it’s just a “you have to try it kind of thing. Otherwise I’m not really sure the mechanics of what is happening when the unrolling is happening.
I wasn't even aware duvets were still used outside of hotels. You guys don't just have sheets and a regular blanket on your bed? Is it a cultural/regional thing? They seem very annoying to deal with and I've never found them to be particularly comfortable, so I'm surprised so many people here seem to use them.
You can have a much higher quality material for both inside and outside, and washing the cover is easier than a full comforter. You wash the inside more rarely with a duvet cover. You can also have one inside and many covers for variety of styles during seasons without having an entire room of the house for storing comforters
Vacuum bags are good for storing that kind of stuff compactly. My duvet and duvet covers semi-permanently live in one! The only kind of blanket I’ve found that is not too warm is gauze.
Exactly, living in Europe, I've literally encountered the sheet+blanket combination for the first time a week ago, in a hotel. Duvets with covers ARE the norm.
A sheet covering the mattress, then we lying on top, then the duvet covering us to varying degrees of area and precision depending on temperature and activity while asleep. My son snakes over and under the duvet several times along his body.
“Fitted sheet” (sheet with elastic on the corners, a little smaller than a same-nominal-size sheet) that covers the mattress, regular sheet, optional light blanket, comforter, optional quilt or something like that if it’s very cold. That’s standard bedding around here (US Midwest). This duvet-only (not counting mattress cover) stuff is wild to me. May have to try it.
With just one quadruple-thick blanket ('duvet') you are either broiling or freezing, with no ability to peel back or add just one layer at a time. Can't understand how anyone can be comfortable with that.
I usually just stick my leg out. Works every time.
Maybe it's more a question about central heating? The temperature in my flat is in same 3-5 degree range most time of the year, so I only had to choose right duvet once.
I think it's regional. Growing up in the western USA, I never saw a duvet with a removable cover. Living in Japan/Korea, I've never seen people use the sheets+blanket arrangement in the home.
BTW, I first heard the word "duvet" as a teenager watching British comedy on PBS. I had to look it up in the dictionary.
Grew up in the Midwest. Unusual in my family and circles. I’ve known what they are since some time in my teens (there’s… a chance the film Fight Club’s actually the first time I both encountered the word and put together some idea of what it specifically meant, though I’d heard it before and thought it was just a fancy word for “comforter”) but we never had any, I’ve never put a cover on one, and I’ve never seen someone putting a cover on one.
Duvets are really warm, good in winter for cold houses without good insulation. Often they're as warm as three or four or even five woolen blankets, but much lighter. Four blankets on top of you is heavy.
I find them annoying in hotels though, where the rooms are usually pretty warm. They use relatively thin inners but they're still usually way too hot for the conditions.
My absolute favorite items in this world are my down comforters and duvets. I have a thick one for winter and a thin one for summer. Sometimes I have them both on the bed and use one as a snuggle blanket. Every night when I crawl in bed it is a form of catharsis like a cat making biscuits.
Most of the people I knew in Australia 10 years ago had duvets. I never even knew what a duvet was until I went to Australia. Moved back to the US and got one. I can only think of one other person I know here who has a duvet
Depends on which part of Europe. In Spain, duvets weren't even a thing in the 80s, at least as far as I know. Everyone used sheets and blankets and/or conforters. The first time I met duvets was in foreign hotels, later Spanish hotels started using them too, and even later, laypeople started using them.
They quickly gained traction (Ikea probably had a big role there) and now both alternatives are common, although I'd say maybe duvets are already the most common.
The Spanish words for duvet and duvet cover (edredón nórdico, funda nórdica) are a testament of the fact that they used to be a foreign thing, here associated (I don't know if accurately or not) with the north of Europe.
I take it you're in a warmer climate, a regular blanket is insufficient for many months of a year here. Like growing up, I had multiple blankets and a duvet, and had similar in some less well insulated houses I've lived in. My current house is better insulated, so a duvet on its own is generally sufficient.
I don't know what you consider to be a warmer climate, but I'm in the midwest US and it goes from around -10°F to 110°F here throughout the year. The temperature outside has pretty much nothing to do with my choice of bedding though, because it's always within 1° of 67°F inside my home unless my HVAC system is broken.
I know a lot of places aren't as into complete climate control as we are around here, so it makes sense that those places would have different priorities when making bedding choices, now that I think about it. Thanks for sharing.
Here in scotland, uk, in winter, the interior temp of my house will drop to 16 or 17°C overnight, from its regular temp of 20/21°C during the day when the heating is on.
Outside temperature range round here is maybe -6°C to 24°C
I don't know what standards the RoW uses, but we have a TOG rating here for our duvets ... we have a 4 for summer, and 13 for winter.
Hah, this is definitely a cultural thing. Except that I’ve visited the US, I wouldn’t even be aware that blankets were still a thing; when I was a kid in the 90s duvets had already largely taken over (Ireland is a blanket -> duvet country).
Where I'm from we have holes in the top corners of the cover. Just put your arms in there, grab the duvet and pull it in, shake it a bit, done (additionally you might need to fix the bottom corners and shake again). I was surprised when I went to other countries where you have to fiddle with only a bottom opening.
In 2007 Ikea stopped selling duvet covers with holes in the corners. “It’s for the international market” they said.
There was a national uproar. People no longer knew how to make their beds.
Attempts were made at convincing them to bring the holes back but without success. We have now settled for the typical Swedish response of making an angry fist with the hand securely hidden inside a pants pocket.
I was annoyed at first and iirc my ex-GF cut the corners, once I realized the put-hands-inside-edges-of-inverted-cover-and-grab-the-duvet-corners-and-pull-through method I've mellowed on them since it goes fairly quickly.
I personally just used the covers alone, but I also found out that finally there is some with buttons or even with zipper. And pillow covers with zippers are amazing.
We've had multiple covers, and the one that we've liked the most has holes in the top corner, along with ties.
Long story but we went to someone to have a cover custom made (she advertised this kind of thing, and for us it was partially to use fabric that had sentimental value for us). She ended up arguing with us about how we didn't need the holes, and demonstrated this flip move that seemed impractical for a large comforter.
I wish all duvets and covers had ties, and more importantly covers with holes. It's so much simpler and direct a solution.
I have no idea where my wife found them but we have duvets with an opening ⅓ of the way up, ½ the width of the duvet. Means you can’t invert it, instead just the top corners out through the hole, and I usually need to use my teeth as a third hand while I use the others to stuff the duvet in through the hilariously tiny aperture.
For a queen size duvet I just stuff the entire duvet inside the cover and then align the two corners farthest from the hole, pinch from the outside and shake, takes less than a minute if I'm in a rush and no inversion required. I do have very long arms though, and maybe this would be faster for a king size duvet cover.
This is what I do as well basically. It's usually more confusing to me to figure out what's top and bottom versus sides than to actually put the cover on.
This practice of roll-invert-unroll is very common in India. I recall putting on liners on beddings and blankets when I was ~6 year old in the 1990s.
I didn't realize until I saw comments that it's not the normal way here in western parts. I think may be hospitality industry may use it already and not commonly documented.
Thanks for documenting it. Now I have a blog to point to when teaching my kids.
I just put the duvet into the cover, making sure two corners of the duvet go to the deepest corners of the cover, then stand on bed, hold those two corners and shake for a few seconds, then lay it flat on the bed and adjust as required. Takes 30 seconds, plus time for closing the fasteners.
My wife introduced me to an interesting and possibly KKK-inspired method where she would wear the duvet cover inside out, totally covering herself, and then pick up two corners of the duvet with her hands inside two corners of the cover. Then she'd reverse the cover off herself onto the duvet, from which point her method was the same as mine. I found it hilarious.
Somewhat relatedly, if you use elasticised fitted sheets, you may not be aware (I wasn’t for the first 25 years of my life) there is a simple trick to being able to fold them neatly when not in use.
Essentially you fold it twice so that all four corners are “on top” of each other, then you tuck all the elasticised corners into each other.
Related question: what method do you use to keep the duvet in place inside the cover?
I have some animal themed safety pins that my parents used on my duvet since I was a child. I put four of them in a square shape around the middle of the cover when the duvet is inside.
If needed, I grab a cover border, and align the duvet border within it, make sure corners are aligned too, and then again : shake it. It comes back to place.
I think you might also just roll the inner up, stick it the bottom of a collapsed cover, then grab both an exposed inner corner + side of the cover in each hand and stand up with it, shaking a bit to get it to unroll on the way down.
In Australia a duvet is called a “doona” and while there are some perverts who use a sheet between person and doona (these are people who don’t like to wash doona covers), fitted-sheet=>sleeper=>doona is the standard
I'm in the US and we use a flat sheet between us and the duvet cover. We wash the duvet cover but the flat sheet gets washed more often and is less expensive to replace, and is replaced more often (nothing gets replaced that often, but relatively speaking).
I don't think there's really any right way of doing things though. Sometimes I wonder if we should just have a linen blanket or something on top in the summer but we never seem to get too hot somehow, and I've never managed to find a top blanket that is the right size and that we like.
(I'm also not really sure I want to store our duvet just for the summer either but that's solvable.)
I do this during hot nights - easier to micro-regulate your body temperature with a extra thin layer. Easier to wash is a bonus. Plus they tend to be finer quality.
I couldn't understand past the part where it was rolled down to the bottom, Fig 6.
However, this was never a problem for me. I simply grab the top corner of the inner part and match it inside with inside corner of the outer part. Then the other top corner. Then pull them both to the top of the bed, then fix the bottom—easy.
I go into the duvet cover with the duvet. Hold the two upper corners, put the duvet cover over your head, attach each corner of the duvet to the corresponding corner in the duvet cover (I buy ones with strings for this purpose). Then extricate yourself, hold the corners you just attached, shake vigorously, handle fine alignment of the bottom corners, and button the thing up.
I am sure people will make fun of this but I get it done in a minute (buttoning all the buttons at the bottom is the hardest part), and I do wash it every 2 weeks, so... poke fun all you want, at least I'm not rolling around in filth from a month ago.
I remember learning this and thinking it was so cool. Then I realized how much effort it takes to lay a shirt so flat and straight on a flat surface in the first place, and I went back to my “grab the shoulders, shake the middle away from me, bring them together, tuck sleeves in while folding in half” way I’ve always done.
Half the work of shirt folding is getting the shirt to a known orientation anyway, I much prefer letting gravity do the work here.
Interesting that this is referred to as Japanese shirt folding. This is how I learned to do it decades ago, and there was no Japanese attribution at the time. I wonder if it is claimed (by whom?) to have been invented in Japan, or if it's just because the video is in Japanese.
And even that is suspect, considering that the Japanese text is nonsense and the clothing is of course not produced in either Britain or Japan[1]. Kudos to them for actually specifying their factories though!
T-shirts are the easiest thing to fold. The real nightmare is the wife's pile of clothes. Every piece of clothing is unique and different in shape and size. Some of them I wouldn't even know how to wear let alone fold
Been doing this for years, sans the roll/unroll. After tying the corners, reach all the way inside the inside-out cover, grab the two corners furthest from the opening, pull all the way through, and shake.
Either way the duvet will accumulate grime at night that someone should be able to smell. I wash and change my bedding weekly and am disgusted by the low frequency others are reporting. Who enjoys the texture of besweated beddings? I can certainly tell the difference and I love clean sheets and hate stale ones! How do people not feel or care about this sensation?? Especially if you have sex on sheets that you don't wash for weeks. Holy ew.
It's fine to question it, but when questioning something millions of people do every day, year in year out, you might want to find a different hill to die on.
> We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our website, to show you personalized content and targeted ads, to analyze our website traffic, and to understand where our visitors are coming from.
Like … I'm on what appears to be a person's blog. Who's "We"? What personalized content could one possibly receive from someone else's blog? (And of course, oh boy targeted ads.)
Like … maybe some sort of out of the box thing gone amok, but the about page seems to indicate it's a pretty homegrown blog…?
> We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our website, to show you personalized content and targeted ads, to analyze our website traffic, and to understand where our visitors are coming from.
Like … I'm on what appears to be a person's blog. Who's "We"? What personalized content could one possibly receive from someone else's blog? (And of course, oh boy targeted ads.)
Like … maybe some sort of out of the box thing gone amok, but the about page seems to indicate it's a pretty homegrown blog…?
This can be easily solved by having 2 holes at the top corners, it makes life so much easier when adjusting and inserting the duvet. No need for any convoluted methods like roll-invert-unroll.
I vary it based on if the cover came out the machine inside out or not.
If it did, I spread out the duvet, burrow inside the cover, grab the far corners of the cover from the inside and then through it also the corners of the duvet at the same time, and invert it.
If it came out the right way round, I spread out the cover, grab two corners of the duvet, burrow inside the cover with the two corners of the duvet until they reach their destination, and come out again.
My preferred technique is to grab a corner, crawl inside the duvet and pin it to the corresponding corner. Then I crawl out and repeat with the opposite corner. From there, I just pull the front two corners over the comforter then button/zip it up then furl it out. I'm not saying this is the best method but it works fine for me. My wife has no techniques that work for her, lol.
I really miss Japanese duvet/futon covers; the corners have holes for the duvet to stick through, and the duvet has velcro straps that attach to loops on the cover. Every duvet/cover I own lacks this totally basic thing that prevents the duvet from falling all to one side of the cover.
In Sweden all covers used to have holes in the upper corners.
Really easy, just stick your hands in and pull the duvet out.
Rumor has it thay IKEA stopped selling covers with holes at the top because lots of people came back and said they were broken. And now others are doing the same.
I don't see this method working very well for me since I always use duvets that are wider than the bed, which I thought was the norm. Same width as the bed makes for tug-of-war with the sleeping partner.
120 cm wide bed -> 150 cm duvet,
140-160 cm bed -> 240 cm duvet
The correct technique is to replace a duvet cover by going to the store and purchasing a comforter. Ideally, purchase two comforters and alternate the one you’re washing with the one you’re using so that the bed is never without one.
I think there's a gap between the "bedroom is center of home" people and the "bedroom is for sleeping" people. For the former, they value things like changing the appearance of the bed for seasonal or taste-based reasons. For people like me in the latter category, the things on the bed are like the floor mats in my car: as long as they're clean I don't give a damn what they look like. They're purely functional objects that I don't even see for more than a few seconds a day.
Kinda off topic but what is the name of the background on this blog? i.e. those patterns do they have a name? My mom used to have the same patterns on some sheets as a kid but no clue what they're called?
I just hold the duvet by the two front corners, shove it inside the cover and find the edges. Hold the edges from the outside of the cover, shake. Takes 30 seconds.
We also change it weekly, sleeping in the same covers for a month sounds disgusting.
I also learned it from my grandparents, but I've been the one introducing it to a number of people in my life. Some of them have described it as black magic — so it's not very well-known.
