Of moths and mending

I have a serious programme of moth management due to the amount of wool that is stored at my place.  It involves ziplock bags, careful wool storage, regular washing of clothing and pheromone traps.  However, there are noticeably more moths in this house than our previous one, and it has wool carpets.  This winter when I pulled out my woolens, the jumpers were all intact but one of my fine woollen undergarments had suffered some nibbling.  There is a small hole on the front:

And a small cluster of holes on the back.

I thought I might just leave them.  This garment is not outerwear and surely they wouldn’t run too far.  But then I thought of mending them with silk thread and overdyeing the whole garment in eucalyptus… and just when that was tickling my fancy, I dyed silk embroidery thread with Plum Pine and got colours that seemed like they might fit… and so I spent an evening working on my mending.

Since the moths gave me circles (more or less), I worked with that theme.  I’ve tried to leave a little extra thread at the outer edge of each part of the darn to accommodate stretch–which is what my Mum taught me to do when darning a sock.

The silk yarn I pulled out of the plum pine and vinegar dyepot the day after darning is a deeper shade, so I’m considering further embellishment with that, or the silk I dyed the night we worked with the indigo dyepot.  But for now, I’m pleased to have mended these holes… and on the same weekend as I mended a ravelled hem, for good measure.  This will be an initial washfastness test for the plum pine on silk, too…