Packing Knits Away for Summer

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We live in Toronto, where the summers are hot and humid but the winters cold and snowy. That means that while we wear our wool sweaters almost every day from November through March, we barely touch them all summer. Of course, when you are packing away your knits for summer, you want to make sure that the sweaters will be in good condition once you’re ready to wear them again. Here is what we do when packing away knits for summer:

Depill

Although not mandatory, depilling your knits can help keep them looking fresh. Pills will often form on knits after they’ve gotten some wear. Of course, some yarns pill more readily than others. If you don’t mind the look of pills, you can leave them. However, I find that after a long winter’s wear, my pullovers and cardigans are speckled with pills. Since you are giving a bit of love to your knits, why not spend a couple extra minutes to depill? You can use a battery-operated fabric shaver or a gleener. A gleener is like a squeegee that has a pumice or pumice-like blade that will shave the pills off your knits. Gleeners can come with different gauges of pumice, so you can choose the appropriate one for the yarn that you’ve used.

A battery-operated fabric shaver has a blade covered by a screen with holes, as well as a collection insert. The pills are sucked into the screen and then cut off, and then collected in the insert.

Wash in Wool Wash

There are several different brands of wool wash available on the market now. Our favourites are the Canadian companies Eucalan and Soak. Eucalan contains some lanolin, so I like to use it on more rustic or really woolly wools. I use Soak for everything else. Both are no-rinse, meaning you fill a basin with tepid water and a bit of the wool wash, soak your knit item, and then squeeze out the water.

It’s important not to wring your knits, as this can stretch and distort your items. Instead, I squeeze out all the water I can with my hands in the bathtub. Then, I lay the knit item on a towel, roll it up like a cinnamon roll, and then stand on it. This squeezes out any extra moisture using all of my body weight, and the towel readily absorbs it.

Let Dry Fully

Once you’ve washed your knits, let them dry fully. Wool is biodegradable, which is one of the reasons we love it so. However, if you seal it in an airtight container while it’s still wet, it can rot. So let it dry fully! You can dry your knits on a regular laundry rack. For garments especially, you want to let the item dry flat to help preserve the shape and size. I will lay out a garment flat on my laundry rack and let it dry. If you’re drying several items at once, you can use a sweater dryer. This consists of a flat mesh that either is held up on legs or with fabric straps that you can hang. Sweater dryers allows air to circulate and speeds up the drying process. We have a collapsible, three-tier, hanging sweater dryer.

Seal in Plastic Bags (with Optional Moth Papers)

Once your knits are all washed and dried, store them in plastic sealable bags or bins. Ideally the storage container should be airtight to prevent critters from getting in and eating your projects. The main pests to watch out for are moths and carpet beetles. Moth larvae and carpet beetles love to eat wool, and so to prevent your knits from developing holes through the summer, store them in airtight containers. You can also add a sheet or two of moth papers that are sold in hardware stores if you want to be extra careful. These repel moths and don’t have the terrible chemical smell of mothballs. Lavender sachets and cedar shakes are also purported to repel moths, but I don’t know how effective they really are. We also keep a moth trap near the boxes (and our yarn) to catch any errant moths. This also alerts us of any problem (fingers crossed)!