Moth Eaten Memories Part 2

A few days ago I shared the post Moth Eaten Memories talking about finding all my old creative writing and art was being eaten by not only mildew but also moths. I don't like house moths. I've liked them progressively less over the past six months, probably because although I wage war against them they seem to persist. I like bugs in general. But I don't like house bugs. I'll make an exception for spiders and for bugs that come in accidentally, but silver fish and house moths get me riled up.

In my last post I shared that I froze my documents. The next day I took them out of the freezer.

I started by collecting supplies: My cleaning cauldron with some vinegar, paper towel, a cooler whose lid seals decently, and my frozen papers.

I spread the papers out on the table and then waited for them to return to room temperature. 

The table wasn't quite big enough for all the documents so I spread them out evenly. A lot of these have smoke damage because they survived my house fire in grade 10. 

I started by removing blank pages. A professional dealing with real historical documents might have left them, but these are my records and I need to fit them all in a container and store them somewhere in my house, so I threw out the pages I hadn't done any art or writing on.

Once I had sported the papers I stacked them neatly and found a large piece of wrapping paper. I added a bit bouquet of lavender to keep the bugs away.

Then I wrapped it all up and tied it with yarn. I put this bundle into the cooler. I plan to get a proper container for these soon so we can use our cooler again, but this was a good solution in the short term.

The most important thing I did? I didn't put this package back under my bed. I put it in the front closet, which I have designated as the place in the house where I get to store things. I've decided that the spot under the bed will no longer be my dumping ground. Frankly it can't even be a storage location unless we deal with our current mildew problem. 

Disclaimer: Although I am actually considering a career in archival science and document preservation, I have not taking any courses toward this degree. This is not the professional method of preserving old documents but simply my approach with the resources I had on hand.