I wish I had a big freezer in Montana...

 ...Come to think of it, maybe I do! Definitely time to look in the garage. I was cleaning up the sewing area here in the basement and I found a large, green, garbage bag under my cutting table. A wave of foreboding swept over me, you might even say my blood ran cold. Let me back up a bit.

Early in July--not too long after we arrived from our annual migration from Austin--my cousin and his children came to Polson for a visit. Evenings, as we'd sit in the cool of the basement watching tv or exchanging stories of the day, Charlotte (the daughter) would run about the room chasing after little moths. When she'd catch one she'd exclaim with joy as she squished it. The moths looked like India meal moths or wool moths--but I couldn't figure out what their food source here could possibly be. When our guests went home, I still saw the occasional moth, but apart from squishing them myself, I didn't do much of anything about them.

For a little background: I had a horrible infestation of wool moths in my fiber studio in Austin a couple of years ago. I NEVER want to go through that again! I had over 300 lbs of raw wool and roving and who knows how much yarn. The two easiest ways to kill moths, larvae, and eggs, are to heat them over 120 degrees F for more than 30 minutes (the dryer works well), or to freeze them for 72 hours to two weeks--depending on your source. I could not imagine tryin to run all that through the dryer--and potentially getting eggs and larvae everywhere. Instead, I got a new chest freezer and used it (along with our giant freezer and smaller freezer in the laundry room, and the bottom-of-the-fridge freezer in the kitchen) as a fiber de-incubator. I bagged and cycled all my infested yarn, fleece, and roving through them in multi-week stages to freeze everything dead. Since then I have been vigilant for their return, but nothing yet. 

Flash forward to today. I gingerly peer into the garbage bag and immediately slam it shut (you can slam a plastic bag shut if you really put your mind and hands to it). Then I race outside and open the bag again. As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, when they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky, a flutter of small brown and white wings lift towards my face. I pull back and start removing small white plastic grocery bags covered in moths--many of the bags were more hole than bag--and throwing them to the ground. I finally upend the bag and dump a slurry of moths, chewed bags, and... sand to the ground. Only it isn't sand. It is what the moths turn raw fiber--in this case yak fiber--into over the course of three years. 

There is still the occasional fluttery critter in the house--and the birds are feeding well outside--but I feel confident that the sweaters, socks, and other apparel knitted by my mother and my father (which is still in the house) is safe. Mostly because they preferred to knit with acrylic rather than wool. I never thought I would be grateful for that choice, but here we are

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