This is why your bed sheets keep coming off

Do you keep waking in the night with your fitted bed sheets tangled around your legs? In the morning, do you find that your once taut and wrinkle-free sheets are a crumpled mess in the middle of the mattress?

If so, you probably have the wrong-sized bed sheets.

With a vast array of mattress shapes, sizes and depths now available, getting the right-sized fitted bed sheets that stay on the bed can be tricky.

How to find the right size

Take a closer look at your mattress – is it a Super King, King, Queen or Double? UK Double, or European Double? Full UK Double, or Small Double?

With all these options no wonder so many people suffer from the same frustrating problem!

If you want to find out what size mattress you have, take off the sheets and look for the label on your mattress. No label or the details rubbed off? Then it’s time to whip out the measuring tape and make careful notes. Once you’ve got all the info you need, it’s a simple task to search online for fitted bed sheets in the correct size.

UK Bed and Mattress Size Guide

Single Bed 137cm x 200cm –  Buy Single Fitted Sheets
Three-Quarter Bed 122cm x 190cm – Buy Three-Quarter Fitted Sheets
Double Bed 200cm x 200cm – Buy Double Fitted Sheets
King Size Bed 230cm x 220cm – Buy King-Size Fitted Sheets
Super King-Size Bed 260cm x 220cm – Buy SuperKing Fitted Sheets
Emperor Bed 290cm x 235cm  – Buy Emperor Fitted Sheets

Quick fixes

If your measuring tape has gone astray, you’ve no time to get to the shops, or you’re looking for a temporary quick fix before your new sheets turn up in the post, don’t worry – we’re here to help.

Read through our eight top life hacks and help your bedsheets stay put from dusk till dawn.

1. Mattress protector

Sheets slipping off because they’re too silky? Try a mattress protector or mattress topper – the extra thickness it will add to the mattress, combined with the additional friction, may help keep your sheets in place.

Browse our Mattress Toppers >
Shop Mattress Protectors >

2. Flat sheets

Give up on fitted sheets altogether and switch to flat sheets. Watch an expert here on how to create beautifully crisp, hotel-style corners on your bed.

Easy Care Cotton Flat Sheets >
1000 Thread Count Flat Sheets >
Egyptian Cotton Flat Sheets >

3. Embrace your braces

Grab two pairs of trouser suspenders. Clip one corner of your wayward bed sheet to one end of a pair of braces, and then clip the other end to the diagonally opposite bed sheet corner.

Repeat with the second pair of braces and the remaining two corners. Make sure the braces are positioned on the underbelly of the mattress and not on top of it.

4. Get out the sewing machine

Get crafty by sewing strips of material from one side of a bed sheet corner to the other in order to create a handle for each corner of your sheet. Hook each corner handle over the mattress to anchor that unruly sheet to the bed.

5. Double-sided sticky tape

Place one side of sticky tape to the mattress and the other side to the corresponding bed sheet edge. Confine to the corners or attach all the way along the edge of the mattress. Caution: this may cause stickiness – any leftover sticky residue is not guaranteed to come out in the wash.

6. Stick a pin in it

Rummage through the kitchen drawers for a few safety pins and attach your sheet directly to your mattress. Warning: night-time wriggling combined with safety pins may rip your sheets.

7. Find another bedroom

If none of the above takes your fancy, then it may be time to take over the children’s bedroom, invite yourself over to your best friend’s house, or make that long-overdue trip home to see your parents. Surely one of them got it right..?

8. Sleep on the floor

For the truly desperate, give up on the mattress altogether and make yourself a comfy nest on the floor. Camp out under the ceiling lampshade with your favourite book, a midnight snack and a glass of water and leave worrying about those pesky sheets for another night…

For a full range of solutions to your bed sheet problem – check out our fitted sheets and flat sheets.

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