Saturday, January 26, 2013

A Wool CRISIS!!!

A Very, Very Bad thing has happened.  When I got home from Yarn School in October, I was too lazy to unpack all of the lovely fiber that I dyed while I was there.  I was still too lazy to put it away when I went on my next two trips, so for three months it's been sitting in a pile on the bedroom floor (not good, I know).  Today I finally got myself together to put it away, along with some yarn that ended up in the same pile.  I put half of it away, and then as I was picking up the beautiful long braids of hand-dyed wool, I noticed that bugs had taken some bites out of them. 

BUGS!!

It is BAD.  Not in terms of the actual number of bugs (Robert thinks they look like beetles), but because they are there.  And I had started to put things away, so now I am concerned that I might have spread them to my dresser, the sock yarn I store in my bedside table, and the bins I use to store yarn and fiber in the closet.  Places where things I care a lot about, things I have spent hours and hours and hours making, are stored.

We immediately put all of the things from the pile of wool into plastic bags into the freezer.  I got on the internet and found information about clothes moths and carpet beetles (neither of which really look like what I saw on the fiber).  All of the sites I looked at say that washing in hot water is the best thing to do, but since I'm talking about wool, that's really not an option for me.  We're going to get moth balls, even though all of the sites say don't use them because they're toxic to humans as well as moths, but it doesn't seem like anything else will actually kill them.

If anyone out there reading this has good advice about this, please tell me!  I don't know what to do.

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