I sincerely hope that this is my last moth damage post. I noticed that MDK, now called Modern Daily Knitting had a blog post about the little beasties at the start of this week.  I was dismayed to see that the freezer method only works if you can get it ‘Minnesota Winter’ temperatures.  This means temperatures in the region of -20 Celsius.  You can do what I did and alternately freeze them and then defrost, let any eggs hatch and then refreeze, but it’s by no means a certain solution.  I decided to go down the heat route as well.  This involves baking your wool at around 55 Celsius for 30 minutes.  There are many comments on the MDK blog that advocate the use of the oven so decided it was worth a try.

My oven won’t go down that far so I have the choice of 30 C – just perfect to hatch any still viable eggs, or 70 C, that would definitely sort them out once and for all.  Obviously I went for the 70 C.  I piled my wool onto a thick towel on the oven shelf to protect the wool from any metal that was likely to get very hot and allowed the oven to get to 70 and then simply switched it off and left it to cool down.  I repeated this 3 times and so the wool had at least 30 minutes in total at over 55 C.  The wool survived and I also put a bowl of water in the bottom to provide some moisture.  

Today I washed them.  Oh my, what a mess.  I am going to attempt to rescue the wool from the Counterchange shawl and not take my husband’s advice which was ‘just sew it up’.  Thank you dear.  

This ends our moth damage coverage and if there is a future outbreak, your correspondent will be sobbing in the corner of her room.