Horrible discovery

A couple of times in the last few months I've been knitting along happily, when I've suddenly come to a break in the yarn that I wasn't expecting. I've thought 'that's odd...', joined the yarn, and carried on knitting. Then the other day I found a tiny skein of cobweb-weight yarn that's sat in the stash for years, and it looked sort of... messy. Rough. A bit tangled? I pulled it out and looked closer. There were lots and lots of little breaks in the thread, millions of ends where there should only be two. A cold shiver went right down my spine despite the warm wooly cardigan I was wearing... I had discovered evidence of the Knitter's Nemesis... Tineola bisselliella, the common clothes moth. Gaah!

Ok, deeeeep breaths. Nice, slow, deep, calming breaths. How much have they eaten? Where are they? How in the heck am I going to get rid of the little blighters?

Step 1: Paranoia. Check!
Step 2: Investigate, gather evidence. I tore the stash apart and peered closely at every ball and skein to try and see any suspicious signs. I found one other ball (of my best fine handspun, no less!) that had been chewed through in a corner. Nothing else. Hmmmmmm. Relaxing at this point would prove fatal - I'm not going to fall into that trap!
Step 3: Research. I read everything I can find about wool-eating moths on the internet. Some of it is just plain weird... However, there seem to be three options:

1. Freeze the stash. Tricky, there's a lot. And this aparrently won't kill eggs, only live larvae.
2. Heat the stash - cook the little beggars. Impossible with size of stash. Would take months of microwaving or steaming and I just don't have the time or the quarantine space for the stuff that comes out while the rest waits to go in...
3. Blast them with carcinogenic chemicals. Now, usually, I'm quite relaxed about chemicals, I'm not a hippy type, and the way I see it, I want the most corrosive sh*t there is to clean my oven so that I don't have to spend hours on my knees doing it. However, not in my yarn. Not in things that I'm going to spend hours handling and then wear next to my skin. No, I don't think it will give me skin cancer: I think it will itch. I've got quite sensitive skin.

Step 4: Plan. I'm going to freeze the lot, then thaw it for a few days (apparently this makes the eggs hatch as they 'think' it's spring - misapplied use of the word "think" if you ask me...), then freeze them again to kill any new hatchers.

Step 5: execution. One-third of my stash is in the freezer in carrier bags (for ease of handling). It's had 48 hours, so today I'll swap it over with the second lot and leave it bagged up in the garage to thaw out. I'm not risking having it in the same room as the untreated stash. Then in 2 days, the third lot goes in, then 2 days after that, the first lot again, etc, etc.

Then I will watch. And pray.

Just in case you're wondering, I have not seen a single egg or larva. But they must be there somewhere - adult moths do not eat wool. Only the babies. Now, they could have all grown up and left - but I'm not going to risk my beloved wool for the sake of a little work!

On the other hand, all this raking through the stash has mde me get organised and relise just how many treasures I had buried back there - I feel a yarn diet coming on. And you just don't even want to know how many UFOs I found.....