Yes… it has happened to me, the thing that all knitters fear.  I pulled out a sweater to wear today and found… a hole.  And not in a place you would expect one either.  I got immediately suspicious, and dug through my basket of socks (which I haven’t worn much this year due to working from home)  And?  Holes in 2 pairs.  The final count is: 2 pair of socks dead, the millefiori cardigan, and my central park hoodie (sob!)  And either moths or carpet beetles.  I’m not sure which… I found a single larvae in the basket, but is was brown with rings rather than white like the photos online (and I have neither found nor seen any actual moths.)  It did look rather like the photos of carpet beetles I saw online, but I can’t say for sure.

I am just so upset about this… I have always been so careful about bugs, but I made the mistake of allowing handknits to sit in a basket in the dark back corner of my closet… definitely a mistake, and one I knew better than to make.  I have seen no evidence thus far of infestation in the yarn closet – and I do store my yarn in ziplocks – but it’s all getting treated as though I had, since it is in the same room as the infested closet.  It makes me feel like a terrible housekeeper, and just overall icky – I hate bugs, and I’ve spent half the day crawling around on the floor looking for evidence of them.

Half my sweaters are in the freezer, and the others, along with my yarn and wool coats, are in bags on the back porch waiting a trip to my Dad’s deep freeze tomorrow.  I am obsessively vacuuming everything, and washing all my other clothes in hot water (I expect to spend tomorrow wasting my life away at the laundromat.)  Some of them are going to shrink, but better shrunken clothes than moths!  I’m even washing Marc’s, though his are in the guest room, because I cannot be sure how far they have gotten.

Currently, half my sweaters are in the freezer, and the others (along with all my wool coats, drycleanables,  and my yarn) are in bags on the back porch waiting a trip to my Dad’s deep freeze tomorrow.  I read to freeze for several days, take them out for a day or two, and then refreeze again to kill everything.  Our freezer is not large enough for the volume of stuff I need to freeze.

Has anyone had a similar experience?  I would love any advice, or some reassurance that I am not doomed to fight an eternal battle with hungry insects.  I read that these types of infestations are way up, due to the trend towards natural textiles.   Ugh… today was not a good day (and I’m up at 3:30 am because I’ve been disinfecting behind the baseboards (they were loose, and definitely needed to be cleaned behind.)