Cimorene

In addition to moth-nibbled holes in multiple wool socks earlier, this week when I cleaned out the closet I found two older, not-too-precious sweaters that had been definitely eaten, so we were forced to learn about what to do with clothes moths.

I had seen moth traps before, but I didn't realize that those only work on male moths and so they don't help your clothes at all, they just alert you if you might have an infestation. If you do, you have to kill all potential moth eggs in every piece of fabric in your closet with either heat or cold (or like... poison. Mothballs are poison. They are bad for people and animals as well as for moths though, they stink, and they need very specific conditions to work at all, so they're not nearly as useful as heat or cold).

If a fabric thing made with natural fibers (synthetic fibers repel moths but unfortunately they also repel us, because they tend to feel like shit on your skin as well as not breathing, retaining odor, harboring bacteria and fun stuff like that, because they are plastic) has been in near contact with clothes-eating moths, you have just a few alternatives:

• dry clean it (this will kill the moths and presumably dry cleaning chemicals don't leave the clothes poisonous to people? I've never had my clothes dry cleaned, but surely I'd've heard about it if it poisoned people?)


• kill it with cold: hang outside when it's well below freezing, like around -17 C (around +1 F) for a few days


• kill it with cold: put it in the freezer for a few days, making sure the freezer is set cold enough


• kill it with heat: put it in the oven for a couple of hours at about 70° C or 158° F


• kill it with heat: put it in a sauna at around 70-80 C for a couple of hours

Luckily we DO have a sauna, so that's where nearly every scrap of wool from the house is right now. The silk scarves are going in the freezer, and all the cotton and linen is going back through the washing machine on hot - including all the stuff from the Rarely Worn side of the closet and all the stuff that's already been washed since it was worn (but was then put away in the contaminated closet).

Just half the closet made four loads of laundry. We don't have a dryer (hardly anyone in Finland has a dryer). And we only have three laundry racks!! (Which is already kind of ridiculous, tbh, if we WEREN'T trying to wash 80% of all the fabrics we own at once.) So. The constraint here is drying time.

Meanwhile, the closet, once emptied, needs to be vacuumed thoroughly, washed with warm water, and... it would help if the wood were painted but it's too late for that now (oil paint drying time is way too long to go without a closet and the fumes so close to our bedroom... just no), so I guess we'll just have to put up some of those moth traps for early warning and try to scatter aromatic herbs everywhere, although the word from experts is that none of them reliably works as moth repellent apart from cedar, and cedar only works in an enclosed space where the concentration of cedar oil in the wood is quite high. So I guess... the inside of a chest that's been, what, soaked in cedar oil or something?