The Doctor is In

Remember that I discovered some insect holes in a few sweaters?

I went through all of the woolies, and fortunately the damage was limited to 5 sweaters – 2 purchased cashmere sweaters, 2 merino handknits, and one of Larry’s sweaters. I still don’t know whether it was moths or beetles – other than that one beetle I found on the stairs, I haven’t seen any signs of insects.

Fortunately, most of my knitted items are stored in bins or drawers (well-made vintage furniture that actually seals well), and the yarn is all in bins on a different floor of the house. The sweaters that were damaged were all hanging in the closet-formerly-known-as-the-sauna. Yes, we have a 6×8′ sauna. Or at least, we did. Since neither of us cares about saunas, we had put in some closet rods and were using it as a closet. What you can’t see behind the clothes in the straight-ahead-shot is that the sauna goes back a couple more feet, where the heater for the sauna is. Or was.

We decided it was time to gut it, get rid of the heater and the benches, reorganize, and make the space easier to use and clean. Everything was ripped out, sanitized, and pyrethrin-based insecticide was put down around the baseboards. The knits that were in the closet were given a time-out in the shed for a couple of weeks with a no-pest strip to make sure there would not be any remaining live insects/larvae/eggs, then washed.

As for the damaged sweaters, most required minimal repair. The worst damage was to Larry’s Beau sweater. It had two holes, which didn’t involve a lot of stitches, but because of the bulky yarn, the holes were big. I turned to this article on Knitty on repairing knitwear for assistance.

After unraveling the damaged pieces of yarn enough to weave in the remaining ends, I stabilized the hole with some thread (actually, I ended up taking out one additional column of stitches than shown here):

Then I rewove the area using the tips in the Knitty article. It’s not perfect, but I think it will be pretty unnoticeable, especially after another washing and blocking:

The other hole was in a reverse-stockinette section, which was a bit trickier since I did the repair from the wrong side. But it turned out pretty well, too:

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