let's add some teal

The Great Moth Infestation has finally been handled. Any yarn that wasn't thrown out was put in the freezer, thawed, microwaved, rinse and repeat several times. Sweaters were taken to the dry cleaners. Blocks of cedar/lavender sachets/cedar and lavender sprays were purchased. The salvaged yarn (mostly acrylics and cottons) were re-wound with my swift and ball winder and put into ziploc bags. Take that, you little fuckers.

Quite frankly, my knitting corner was asking for it. I had yarn hanging out in baskets and boxes. Even with all of that gone it was still a mess. I had knitting/other crafty books spilling all over an end table.

Yes, they were filed away neatly at one point. Shut up! Know what else is a mess? Your mom!

Trench and I took a trip to our favorite little gem in Chicago, Nadeau, which sells furniture from India and Indonesia for WHOLESALE PRICES! We combed through the warehouse and finally settled on this beauty.

We moved the table off to the side and will most likely be getting rid of it. You can't tell under all those books, but it's an antique that I grew up with. I'm sad to part with it, but I'm hoping someone in my family will take it back. Otherwise I'll try finding it a good home elsewhere. Here's how the cabinet looks filled up with books and yarn.

It would be prettier if the yarn wasn't stored in ziploc bags, but unfortunately ziploc bags are now an indispensable item. I did try to organize by color (which wasn't hard because I mostly have purples and reds). I was shocked that almost all my books fit on the bottom shelf.

I don't think this would have held even half of what I used to have, but I think I was due for a purging anyway. I've decided not to add anymore to the stash until I get through some of what I already have. I haven't done much knitting in a long time, mostly because the old light fixtures we had were so dim, but we're replacing those too so things are better. I just cast on for a new project and I'm falling back in love with the craft.

Besides that, we also found this little table that we couldn't resist getting.

We almost always watch TV by hooking it up to the laptop so we can watch Hulu. The laptop would sit on a dining room chair. It was such a fixture that we decided the laptop needed its own table to sit on.

I'm liking the way this corner looks now, although in its natural state there are a lot more wires and such hanging about. Next on the agenda...a new lamp, ditching the old end table, and replacing our not-very-old purple chair that our cat Bowie decided to turn into a scratching post.

The Knitter's Nightmare

Years ago, in the few months of unemployment I had between esthetician school and my first esthetician job, I learned how to knit from Debbie Stoller's Stitch and Bitch. Like an army of other young women that summer, I fell in love with it. I bought plastic needles and soft acrylic yarn from Joanne's Fabrics and knit my little heart out. It especially came in handy when I started working, because I could knit a scarf in between clients. As the years went on, I bought nicer needles and pricier yarn made of natural fibers and worked on more complicated projects, like lace and cables and sweaters and socks. Knitting is a great hobby because it's portable enough to take anywhere, and it makes lazy nights in front of the TV productive. ("I just watched four hours of Buffy re-runs, but now I have a hat!")

The last year has seen a sharp decline in my knitting. We moved to our first condo, and even though one of the reason I like it here is because there is a lot of natural light, there is an unfortunate lack of unnatural light. Basically the light fixtures the developer put in are very fancy looking, but suck. They require expensive little spotlight bulbs that burn out in less than a week. So once the sun goes down, it gets too dim to do anything crafty. So I haven't really picked up the needles in a long time. I tried working on a sock over the summer, which was nice and reminded me of how much I miss knitting. Then I stopped when I realized I had messed up the number of stitches cast on, which is such a newbie mistake I was disgusted with myself. So I put it down and didn't pick it back up.

The other night, Trench asked me if he could borrow some yarn for the Halloween costume he was putting together. I went into my long-neglected stash to see if I could find something. As I delved in, I realized that something was wrong. All my little rolled up cakes of yarn looked rough, like something had been nibbling at them. For the last couple months we had seen tiny little brown flies around the apt. I didn't think much of them because it was summer, and bugs happen in the summer. I thought they were coming from the drains so I'd been pouring bleach down them. Could they be...moths? My suspicions were confirmed I saw a worm crawling on MY PURPLE MERINO.

I had Trench throw the entire basket out immediately. I rescued a sweater that had still been a work in progress...I only needed one more sleeve. Once the infected basket was gone, Trench and I went through the other boxes. (What, you thought I only had one basket of yarn?) All the natural fibers were toast. Acrylics and cottons still looked okay. I went into the closets to see if they had gotten any of my finished knits, and yes they had. I lost hats and scarves. Luckily the scarf/shawl that had taken me two years to finish was fine because I'd been wearing it. Same with Trench's gray scarf with the intricate DNA cable pattern I had made him years ago. We tend to throw our outerwear on the bed in the guest room rather than hang them up in the closet like we should. Laziness for the win! Sweaters that I've made didn't have worms, but did have webbing (re: cocoons) on them. I stuffed them into the freezer. From what I've read (and you know I was doing research as this was happening), freezing temperatures kills larvae. Heat kills eggs. My sweaters, half-finished sweater, and whatever yarn remains of my stash (because those little fuckers don't eat acrylic but could be hiding in it) have been in the freezer for a few days now.

Dry cleaning kills moths, larvae and eggs so I'm taking my finished sweaters, as well as a couple of coats from the closet that have traces on them, to the cleaners today. My almost-finished sweater is sadly going to be a casualty. I threw out the rest of the yarn that went with it, so there's not much point in keeping it, and it had been in the most infested basket. Tonight the rest of my yarn is going to get baked in the oven. Seriously. 110 degrees for 30 minutes (under careful watch, of course). I don't like the idea of insecticides, so I'm going to douse my closets and drawers with eucalyptus and lavender. (Thank the gods they didn't hit my wardrobe! Except for my knits I mostly wear cotton and acrylics.)

If you knit or crochet and have a stash of yarn hanging about, be aware of what's flying around your home. Clothes moths do not look like the normal moths you see flitting around light bulbs in the summer. They are tiny, about the size of a fruit fly, and look like a fleck of wood when standing still. From now on, my stash will be kept in ziploc bags. Once we get a new light fixture for the living room, I'm hoping to return to my knitterly ways, but now I'm slightly terrified of natural fibers. I might just knit with cotton blends for awhile.