Moth

Here at The Lace Knittery it is usually fibre central. I spin, dye and weave as well as never having less than four projects on the needles and two on the hook. And that is just at home, the design studio is similarly filled from floor to ceiling (come and visit I designed it to be a fibre and yarn filled haven).

I often get queries about fleece. Mostly from people who have one or two fibre bearing animals and along the lines of what do I do with this?

I am super passionate about natural fibres, natural processing and promoting this wonderful resource we have…ffs it’s renewable, biodegradable, natural, is wonderful to wear and use, keeps you warm and cool, keeps you waterproof (if you want to…more of that in a later post), nothing goes to waste because even the poo filled bits go on under my fruit bushes and plants as a degradeable mulch and the countryside only looks like that because it’s grazed! …

…and breathe…anyway, I had a Facebook message. I have these fleece but don’t know what to do with them. Nothing unusual there. I arranged for the person to drop in with them to advise her. A couple of days later the door opened at the studio and a bag was pushed in. No she didn’t want them, couldn’t use them and just wanted to get rid of them. Before I could get on my soapbox again about hating waste she had gone. I had a brief look at the fleece, they looked like Shetland and before she had scooted there was a brief story of getting them from third party.

I was in the middle of something so just bundled them into a bag and bought them home for a bit detective work. Weeks later I had tracked down the original source, and yes they were pure Shetland. I had a moment of fist pumping ‘YE-E-E-S-S-SSS, I am good at fleece recognition’…I know, sad but true…and then went to unearth them from my home studio room.

They were in a clear bag and as I approached I saw something move, and then more things and then I my stomach hit the floor…it could be only one thing…MOTH!!!

In the nearly twenty years I have filled my life, house, family, car and everything else with fibre I have only ever had one other moth incident. That time I had been to a show and bought some angora rabbit fibre to try spinning with. I got it out a few days later and it was alive with wriggly little brown moth caterpillars. I don’t think I have ever moved so fast. They were sealed in the bag but I got it out of the house and at least a mile away before I drew breath. This time the fleece had been in the house at least a month, surrounded by more fibre than the average moth could eat through in a thousand generations. Thoughts of having to Arnie style blast everything with a flamethrower went through my head, along with a long wailing ‘Noooooooooooooooooooo’ I had stuff in there that was special, that I had hoarded for years, that I will never use but is just part of the look at and pet stash (for non yarnivores do not ever question stash, we have useable stash, bored with stash, might come back to stash and no don’t touch but I may let you look at stash, amongst others but it’s all ours and precious so paws off).

OH heard the wail and came to investigate. Now, it might have taken me twenty five years but I have managed to convert him from a total uninterested onlooker to a newby to a yarnivore spinner…I maybe slow to convert but I’m persistent! He took one look at me hyperventilating and in tears one look at the bag and swung into action. The bag was out of the door and at the top of the garden before I had calmed down. We then had damage limitation.

First check had any escaped? We found one on one of my favourite creations…a natural dye logwood exhaust. A Sweartastic five minutes later nothing else. Now if you ever have this problem the way to deal with it is freeze or microwave the fibre filled objects to kill any eggs. Have you any idea how long it takes to empty a yarn filled room? Even now I am not sure I unearthed all the stash. The freezer now contains all the WIP…which leads to some interesting conversations when you look into it for supper inspiration…’well you can have a super Fair Isle cardie that I have almost got to steeking stage, a sweater I got bored with but the yarn is lovely or chicken?’…I then get affronted when he doesn’t opt for the Fair Isle option, I mean who the heck doesn’t like Fair Isle? We then spent the next few days nuking the rest of the yarn and fibre. I only had one mishap where I over did the timing. I did not know you could carbonise yarn, I also did not know it would take approximately two weeks to get rid of the smell from the rest of the house!

We now have a quarantine area for any new fibre and back to the picture at the top…the little brown dots stopped me in my tracks. I had only just undone the bag to process and had it at the base of the stairs in the light to look at. Would OH find me rocking and muttering ‘moth’. Would he find a strangely echoing house that was unaccountably twice the size than he remembered from that morning because I had removed all the stash (including the section that he didn’t know about). Well, no, panic over…we have in addition to Hamish Humperdinck the Wondercat, two rescue kittens…they had been gardening with one of the house plants. Panic, for the moment over.