Novel stash busting tip: Just let the bugs eat it!

Seamsters, is your fabric and yarn getting you down? 

Are you sick and tired of those perky polka dot prints, wool doubleknits, hand-dyed merino hanks and sassy silk crepes hiding in the backs of your stash drawers, muttering and mocking you, whispering evilly "Why haven't you just sewn or knit me into something fantastically amazing and perfectly fitting already?" 

Are you worried that Me Made May '13 is going to be JUST TOO EASY?

What would you say if you knew there was a fast, efficient—and, best of all, 100% FREE—solution?

Try our new and improved.... 

Vicious Little Moth Larvae™!

They creep, they crawl, they chomp, they squiggle, they squirm! You'll have empty drawers in no time—your wools reduced to cheesecloth, your yarn reduced to bits, your handmades more ventilated than EVER before!

"But Mikhaela, how do I get some Vicious Little Moth Larvae™, you ask?" 

That's easy! Just take home a mysteriously holey thrift store cashmere sweater and assume that a gentle hand washing and a good darn will have it right as rain ... Let some woolen items fall to the ground in the deep dark recesses of your closet... ignore your stash for months ... and VOILA!

... er.

But seriously, folks. It's true. My husband and I have spent the past week battling the Moth Infestation of Doom, and I just cannot believe how far the little monsters have managed to spread. Our bedroom closet was the worst—all our suits and my wool skirts eaten, including my Sew Grateful Challenge Colorblock skirt.

But after we cleaned out the closet—washing, cleaning, throwing out or eco-friendly-dry-cleaning EVERYTHING that had survived... I began to inspect all the other drawers in the house. I'm still not done, as I'm going through them all very carefully, opening and shaking out each piece of fabric or item of clothing onto a sheet ...

I got all the way down to the bottom of my first fabric drawer and was loudly proclaiming in excitement to my husband "They didn't eat my fabric!!!!" ... when I unfolded a beautiful piece of cotton shirting and there they were, squirming away (though not eating—they don't eat cotton, they just live on it).

Yeah. So I've had to be incredibly ruthless. Handwashing doesn't kill the pests and I don't have the budget to eco-dryclean every piece of dry-clean-only fabric I had. ALL scraps are gone now—those leftover wool or silk fabric scraps that I'd been keeping for I don't know what—quilts? Stuffed animals?

And I've really made some hard decisions about my clothes as well. On the plus side, this leaves plenty of room for new me-mades. On the minus side, well... THEY ATE MY STUFF AND THEY ARE SO GROSS. (Though mysteriously, they were in my sock drawer but did not TOUCH any of my large collection of wool socks... phew! Probably because I am always opening that drawer and shuffling the socks around, the monsters hate light and disturbance.)

I still am not sure how the nasties got in, but I do suspect it was a beautiful thrifted wool sweater with a few little holes that I'd been meaning to darn... I put it in a hot dry dryer for 60 minutes the minute I got home (to kill potential bedbugs) but maybe that wasn't enough to knock out the moths. Or maybe it was a vintage handbag I bought on Etsy, or a piece of wool fabric from a bargain bin in a dusty old fabric store... Who knows!

Act now... GET YOURS TODAY!

P.S. Knitters, take heart. I'd always been in the habit of keeping all my wool yarn in plastic sweater bags for protection... and I didn't find a single little wool-chomper in those drawers. Too bad I hadn't treated my wool fabrics the same!

When Moths Attack! (What's a Wool Lover to Do?)

They've eaten EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING!

A few months ago while my daughter and I were both in the deepest depths of constant illness, my husband attended a funeral, one of the very rare occasions on which he has need to dig his gray suit out of our bedroom closet. Except when he put on said suit, it was a little more... ventilated than we remembered. He had to wear it anyway, but when we dug deeper...

They'd eaten EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING. Every one of my husband's suits and all three of my suits, my lovely, well-fitting soft wool skirt suits. All of my wool skirts—my favorite long plaid skirt, my high-waisted wool pencil skirt, my houndstooth A-line wool skirt, my pink wool skirt... EVERYTHING.

Well, everything in that closet. (Luckily my me-made wool skirts, my wool sweaters, my wool socks, wool fabric and wool yarn are stored in drawers elsewhere.)

Readers, you know how I feel about wool. It is my main fiber from September to March, and sometimes in-between. Also: I don't have a budget to replace any of that stuff now, so will have to very slowly rebuild my wool wardrobe through thrifting and sewing. (Though we will just have to suck it up and get my husband a suit, as we have been invited to a few events this summer that require it).

Now, the intelligent thing to do once this moth tragedy struck would have been to immediately clean out the closet, throw out all the holey stuff, wash the non-woolens in hot water, vacuum and wipe down the walls and floor... and protect all the other woolens in the house.

But I was really ill (still am, but getting SO much better!) and my daughter was ill and my husband was already doing all of the housework and much of the childcare... so I just SHUT THE DOOR and tried not to think about it until I had time to really attack it. It became the closet DMZ. Since then, I have just tried to make do with clothes from my dresser drawers, but I am much more rumpled than usual as a result.

Anyway... last night we heard some fluttering and other scary noises coming from the closet, like some moths had just hatched and were TRYING TO GET OUT. So I jumped up in terror and ran to protect my newly hand-knit sweater, bagging it up in a giant Ziploc and putting it in a drawer with some cedar balls.

So... yeah. Er. Once I'm feeling better physically, I think I had better tackle that closet before I actually try and sew anything. Especially anything wool.

Any tips and advice or experiences on de-moth-ifying are very welcome. Have you ever had to deal with these hungry little terrors?