Conversation with Howdy

Howdy walked in on me standing in the kitchen, camera pointing at the open microwave door.  "What are you doing?"  he asked, suspiciously eyeing me.

"Blogging"  I responded.

Jump in the Wayback Machine with me...we're going back to June 8 of last year...I cast on with some Regia Strato 5474 and started an stockinette sock for Howdy.  I took it to Cabela's with me, blah, blah, blah.  I decided it was too big and frogged the whole thing.  Two balls of yarn have been sitting in a plastic bag here for months.

Scroll forward to yesterday.  I get out *all* of the bags from the Craft Closet of Doom and array them on the bed for inventory.  I pulled out this bag and one other and decided to rewind them into center pull balls.  I did the other yarn first, then I threaded the first ball of Strato onto the winder and started cranking...what the %$&!  The ball had a break in it!  Ok, a fluke I'm sure...started ball number two...same thing...by the time I was done, this is what I had...

I immediately recognized this for what it was...insects!  I leaped into action!

About a week ago, Dorothy blogged that she'd found the same problem in a WIP at her house.  She said she nuked the little buggers!  She didn't mention how long she did it for, though, so I had to do a little research.

You're not going to believe this, but someone at Stanford has done a study about microwaving wool fabric to kill insects!  I'll summarize it for you...three minutes is the magic number according to this article...

Enter Howdy at this point...

I'm here to report that 3 minutes is too long to microwave yarn to kill insects, though...

Can you see the wisps of smoke rising from the charred remains?

Gosh, the things I do for you blog readers...