Protecting wool from wool moths
Friday, May 20, 2011 at 6:19PM This advice comes from Ruth Walker (www.feltmaker.com)
Make sure your wool is clean before you store it. After you clean it, put it in a brown paper bag that is double folded and stapled at the top. Wool moths will chew through plastic bags to get to the wool but they cannot chew through the paper.
Great.
Attach a small amount of the wool to the outside of the bag so you know what's in there and don't have to open it to look.
This means that I have a weekend long project ahead of me. In fact it may take several weekends to accomplish this. Since I use many colors and types of wool in each project, I'll save out one small basket and watch it carefully for signs of moths.
I have found some sites that tell what to do to get rid of the moths once they find your wool. Here are some of those suggestions:
1. Moth larvae do not like light. Take wool sweaters out of closets and drawers every couple of weeks (life cycle of moth is 21 days) and shake them out or hang them out in the sun. This might work for our craft wool, too. If the sun decides to stay out for awhile, I'll try putting my wool in a mesh bag and hanging it on my clothesline. I'll shake it up a bit for good measure, too.
2. Wash in hot water (above 120 degrees F). This is supposed to kill the moth eggs and larvae
3. Freezing is also supposed to kill the moths.
4. There are various chemical concoctions available but I cannot speak to how safe they are. I haven't found anything yet that I would trust to be non-toxic.
If anyone else has other suggestions, please post them here! It is so discouraging to open a bin of wool and find that it's being eaten away.
Reader Comments (1)
I had this problem a few years ago. I washed everything wool, which was mountains of stuff. I washed all the wool and put it into heavy plastic bags that one can shrink down. (The ones used for making sweaters compressed for storage found in Target. Some are large with air holes to suck out the air with a reverse vacuum. ) Other wool I put in plastic bins with lids that I taped closed and wrapped in shrink wrap. We fumigated our whole house twice in the first year and put out moth traps to detect when any were around so we could search and fumigate that room again. I did discover moth 'hideouts' in both my children's closets (a wool jacket in a suitcase and some wool in a bag) so one has to be thorough. Each moth can lay 200 eggs and those can be behind baseboards so moth traps help to find them as they emerge in the spring. We also made a closet moth proof by putting weather stripping all around the door so coats, skirts, and pants would have a home. After 3 years we no longer had any moths detected, but I am always on the look out.