Showing posts with label knitting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label knitting. Show all posts

October 11, 2012

Fall sweaters and unwanted guests

Firstly, I apologise (again) for the lack of posts on the blog. My personal goal was to post two, hopefully three entries each month, and I failed in September. The machine is fixed and I've been sewing, just no projects I considered blog-worthy. Thus the silence. I am slowly sewing up a shirt for my husband. I really want to do it right so I am taking my time, making a muslin, measuring twice, and cutting carefully. It has been a slower than usual project.

To the topic of this post... Fall sweaters and unwanted guests.
A few years back I made us a few thick wool sweaters for the fall. Actually, I initially made my husband a sweater as a gift, but it became mine because surprises don't allow you to easily measure someone.  :)  It's a beautiful thick zip-up sweater with pockets, and big enough for me that it makes a great 'jacket'. Still needing to make my husband his own sweater, I took all of his wants and dislikes and knit a newer, and more appropriately sized, sweater, complete with hood, wooden buttons and a tree.
 
 The tree design was created from scratch because I couldn't find the right tree pattern anywhere. It was easy actually. I drew a tree, and then using teeny-tiny graph paper, I 'traced' the tree drawing by colouring in squares on the graph paper. From there, I used the chart to count colours in my rows as the back of the sweater was a straight forward stocking stitch. Ta-da! I do have plans to add a lining to my husband's sweater so he can wear it more year-round. But that is yet to come.
So, that's the story of the two beautiful sweaters.
Until I went to wear mine for the first time this fall...
Holes. Where there shouldn't be holes. Oh no. I searched more, and there was a whole chunk of the waistband missing on my husband's sweater! And more holes!  We had (have?) moths.  The hours of work that went into these! So we searched out and plucked those little moth larvae from the sweaters and hats and mitts that had not been stored away (as good wool garment owners should). And we froze and washed and dried and plucked more. There has been no more hole development, so I think they may be gone for now, but from what I read, you can never be certain you are completely rid of them. We just need to be extra careful.
Casemaking clothes moth larva
So I am now in the process of patching, re-knitting and fixing the sweaters. They are looking a little worse for wear; I am not as good a patcher as I am a knitter (and even that is very basic), but they are still warm, and now clean.
Lesson learned: wash and store away your woollies in the summer. With cedar if possible. And kill remove the moths that trick their ways indoors. Hopefully we'll still get more wear out of these sweaters before the moths attack again.