When my fiancé and I registered for our upcoming wedding, we placed a range of items on our registry but mostly what we felt we could use and also share with others at dinner parties. What I didn't include were dish towels.

Honestly, I had quite a few and I liked them. Some I bought in Ireland on a trip in 2007 and others were tea towels that I bought in Australia and Scotland. Plus I had a selection of Martha Stewart towels I really liked.

So I was surprised when three people gave us dish towels as gifts at the bridal shower. But when I got home and was unpacking everything, I realized that my towels looked faded next to the new towels. It reminded me of when my former husband and I were remodeling the house: we were slated to do an addition that would affect our dining room and it was only then that I realized redoing the dining room would make the kitchen look bad. So off to Home Depot I went to select new cabinets.

"Of course you should have new dish towels," said one of the women who gave me several of them. "You have all new things."

And so I went, removing the old dish towels from under the sink and replacing them with the stack of bright, new towels that match the new dishes.

About a week later, Greg told me he was going to use a new Williams Sonoma dish towel to press the water out of shredded potatoes. I quickly directed him to the pile of old dish towels.