Class Project Part 2: Rehousing a Peruvian Knit Bag

A while ago, I mentioned that CWU's Curation and Collections Management class is working with some of our textiles. Part of their assignment included working with me to rehouse the object they chose.

Using a series of videos from the Minnesota Historical Society as our guide, we set out to house the textiles. The first piece we did was a small knitted bag, probably from Peru.


The bag had two major needs: a new tag to replace the fading ink on its current tag, and some padding, to relieve pressure on the creases that had formed from being stored flat for many year.


Our first step was to relabel the object. To do so, I first removed the old tag, very carefully, so as not to pull on the knit stitches of the fabric. Meanwhile, Taylor, a student in the class, wrote the catalog number on a piece of twill tape with an Identi-pen; this will be our new label.


Sewing labels to textiles is always a very delicate procedure. The sewing needle and thread need to be very carefully placed between the thread or yarn of the textile that needs to be labeled. To sew down this label, I tacked both ends of the label to the bag without tying knots that might pull on the fibers and cause stress or damage.

We then padded out the bag with some unbuffered acid free tissue paper. In this rather unscientific process, we crumple some tissue paper and place it inside the bag, giving it some bulk and taking some pressure off of the creases that have developed from years of being stored flat.



We then placed the stuffed bag on another sheet of unbuffered acid free tissue paper which will serve as a handling sling, allowing us to easily lift the bag into and out of the box in which it will be stored. In this case we also added a small pillow to stabilize the delicate 'handle' on the bag.


In the interest of space, many textiles will be stored in a single box. Each piece will have a tissue paper sling, and a larger muslin sling will allow us to take all the pieces out of the box at the same time.


Finally, the box is closed up and put back into storage until the textile is needed for research or exhibit.


Each of the students in the class had a different textile to work with, and each faced different challenges to housing it appropriately. By the end of the quarter, each piece was successfully rehoused and readied for storage. A very successful project!

Object History

Unfortunately, we don't have extensive records on many of our objects. Sometimes we don't know if an object was donated to us in a broken state, or if it broke in our care (over the nearly 40 years a museum in some form has existed). So it was really exciting for me to find a contact print documenting the repair of a broken object.


I presume this occurred in the 1970s, when there was a great deal of activity in the collections. You can see that the ceramic figure was in (at least) two pieces, broken right down the middle.


Presumably, an adhesive was applied to the broken edges, and then it was held together. By what look like rubber bands. And then it is all one piece again!


And the repair has held through all the years. You can still see the crack running down the center of the figure.


I've got a large box full of negatives to go through. I wonder what other object stories we'll uncover as we work through those.

Mystery Box Revealed

Remember that box from the other day? Were you curious about what was in it?



Four words: Ethiopian Goat Skin Sandals.

Ethiopian goat skin sandals which were once the home of an astounding number of pests, judging by the number of tiny molted bug skins I removed from the nooks and crannies of the sandals with tweezers. To be honest, it was pretty gross. I took a photo of the pile of moltings I removed from just one sandal. And possibly not all of them.



Icky, huh? I was glad to find that, despite all of the moltings, I didn't find anything that looked live.

In other news, the US election is coming up pretty soon. Voter registration in Washington State ends in a few days. If you haven't registered yet, go do it! And then vote! This has been a non-partisan message from your friendly civil servant.

Freezers: Not just for freezing food anymore

The museum has a freezer. In fact, we're going to get a bigger and better freezer in our new facility, but this little freezer is doing okay for the time being.


Um, okay, so we have a freezer. That's kind of boring. But why does a museum have a freezer? For hoarding microwave dinners and popsicles? No! For Integrated Pest Management!

Some bugs eat the kinds of things we keep in museums: fur, leather, paper, glue, horn, pretty much anything. But spraying collections with chemicals can be bad for the objects, not to mention the staff, so most museums use an IPM approach. IPM tries to be environmentally friendly and use methods other than pesticides to control potential infestations. And one of those methods is freezing (.pdf).

Freezing an object once will kill many pests. Freezing an object twice will kill most larvae/eggs. And that's what I did recently - sent this mystery box through a freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw cycle.


The box is wrapped in two layers of plastic sheeting and masking tape. The barriers should prevent condensation from occurring on the object (which is Not Good) - condensation should instead occur on the outside of the barrier. And not all objects should be frozen either. Anything painted, metal, glass, and teeth are among the objects which should not be treated in this manner.

But what's in the box? Well, I'll get to that on Friday - I think this post is getting long enough.

PS: I've spruced up the sidebar with some new widgets. What do you think? If you know of some great widget (or better ones than I've found), let me know!

Fragile objects

There are many fragile objects in this collection - feathers, beading, paper mache masks, broken glass bottles - but there are some objects that make me nervous just looking at them. This partially reconstructed bowl is one of them:







My best guess is that this bowl or pot was never a whole object in the collection. There was a donation of thousands of pottery sherds received in the 1970s, and I think the pieces making up this bowl came from that donation. This bowl is one of the objects which lacks any documentation. There is no number written on it, which is the primary way in which I can match an object to its records. Fortunately, this type of pottery is a very small percentage of our collection, so I can make some educated guesses about its history.

I believe that these pieces came to the museum in pieces and were reconstructed as a student project. In many areas, one can see the glue seeping through the cracks and yellowing.


Most of the repairs seem reasonably secure, and I was able to lift it, but it makes me very very nervous to breath within a couple of feet of it. So what is going to happen to this bowl/pot? For the time being, it will be recorded as an undocumented object - an object that we might be able to find information on later, but don't have it right now - and taken care of as best we can. Deciding how to house it so it can be moved to a new facility will certainly be a challenge!

Science Friday!

I listen to NPR here at work quite a bit. Right now it's Talk of the Nation Science Friday, one of my favorite shows. There are two gentlemen from the Getty Conservation Institute discussing art conservation and the agents of deterioration. Should be quite interesting.

Podcasts are available, and this segment is running at the beginning of the second hour. Check it out if you want to learn more about preserving and conserving from some very experienced folks.

Environmental Monitoring

Summer is coming! At least it is according to the Weather Underground.


It still looks a bit like spring outside.


Okay, but what does this wonderful turn in the weather have to do with collections management, since that's why we're all here? Well, let me tell you! So the point of collections management is to maintain and protect collections from deterioration. One thing which causes the deterioration of collections is environmental conditions. That is, things stored at the wrong temperature or at the wrong relative humidity can deteriorate faster - just imagine what would happen if you stored your books in the bathroom, with all that water in the air. They'd wrinkle and crease, and maybe start growing mold. So you can see why it's important to keep an eye on the environmental conditions.

Our storerooms have dial thermohygrometers which indicate both the temperature and the relative humidity.


When we move to the new building, I will be using a very popular digital device called a datalogger which will perform the same function, but at a high degree of accuracy and consistency (I'll admit, sometimes I miss a day here and there, not to mention weekends.)

And to keep track of changes, I take down the reading every weekday morning. In this way I can keep track of trends over time.


It's not rocket science, it's not even fancy, but from these readings, I can generate excel charts showing the change over time, like this one from last October for relative humidity:


You'll see on that chart a relatively sudden drop in relative humidity(RH) - in about 2 days it drops 15%. That means the air got a lot drier pretty quickly. When changes happen suddenly like that it can put a lot of stress on sensitive objects, causing cracks, pieces falling off, and invisible damage that will accumulate over time.

This subject is of special interest right now because this week I saw a jump of about 15% in RH in a couple of days. I also found a document in the files from the 1970s, when the building the collections are in now was being built. It indicated that the entire building was environmentally controlled and would have a building wide RH of 45-55% (a standard 'normal' setting). But my tracking has shown that this environmental control has faltered somewhat over the years - RH in one storeroom spent much of the winter under 20%.

So what does this all mean? It means that our storage rooms have less than optimal environmental conditions. What can I do about this? Not a whole lot, really. I can monitor it, be aware that this may cause condition problems for some of our objects, and make plans to improve things in the future.

And I can spend some time in the sun this summery weekend, enjoying the natural environmental conditions.

A Broken Bottle

Yesterday and this morning I've been constructing storage for one of the most fragile objects in the collection. Not only is this object fragile, it's actually broken. It's a brown glass bottle, enclosed by basketry and was probably made by an individual in the Makah tribe. Problem is, at some point in the past, the glass bottle broke. The basketry is still completely in place, but when moved you can hear the glass shards clattering into each other within the basket. (click on any of the photos below to see larger versions)



My first step was to make a box that the bottle could be isolated in. The box has ties on the sides which means that the sides drop down, making it easier to get the bottle out for research.



But just setting the bottle inside the box isn't going to stop it from tipping over and breaking further, so I made two Tyvek pillows. These pillows are filled with polyester quilt batting and sewn shut. The pillows are then attached to opposite sides of the box with velcro.



Then I closed up the box, tied the sides, and, viola!, the bottle is immobilized but it is not subject to too much undue pressure. The pillows can also compensate for any shifting that may occur within the body of the object.



This housing should help to mitigate further damage to the object and help to support it as well. It's a beautiful object, so I'm pleased that this box is a success.

I looked around the internet, and if you'd like to see similar basketry bottles, check out the Ethnology Collection at the Burke Museum, which is available to look at online.

Ears, Nose, Throat, and Museum?

I guess you could say that I'm part of the Google generation. I turn to Google products multiple times every day. I blog on Blogger, which is owned by Google. My primary email is through gmail, I use Google maps to find where I'm going, and I use google search to find the answers to my questions.

Today I was thinking about the furs and hides in our collection. We have a large sheep or goat hide with fur intact and more than one tanned or semi-tanned leather hide. As part of a class project in the Winter quarter we're planning on rolling many of our Navajo rugs and Mexican textiles. At some point it came up that we might roll the fur.

My collection manager instinct said that rolling a hide was not ideal, but I've been trying to find out if this is true. So I googled "fur museum storage" or something quite close, and I found this page on preserving fur and leather. But something seemed funny. Why was this information coming up on a website for Otolaryngology? That's the fancy word for ear, nose, and throat doctors. Apparently, like many professional associations, they have a museum. And their museum provides pages with rather general info on all kinds of collections. How about that?

The otolaryngology page does say that leather and furs are but stored flat, but I'm going to check out some more google results to corroborate this.

A Mystery Revealed

Last Friday's Whatzit was nigh impossible. It was a closed box with only the dimensions to guide you.

The consensus of the guesses was that it might be footwear (moccasins, knit socks, Jimmy Hoffa's loafers), but that it could be anything. Not footwear, folks.

They're masks!




From the collection of a former art professor on this campus, this is a pair of Nootka masks. Our documentation shows that there were originally three masks, but the third has not been located for approximately three decades.



These wooden masks are some of the first to be rehoused in anticipation of our future collections move. The custom box is built to fit within a standard bankers box. A layer of foam topped by quilt batting could be laid in the box to prevent shifting during the moving process. The masks sit on custom made pillows sewn from Tyvek and stuffed with polyester quilt batting. The pillows support the masks and keep them from resting exclusively on their edges - this distributes pressure.

Additionally, the boxes create a microenvironment which buffers the masks from the changes in temperature and relatively humidity in our storage areas.

Foamy, foamy, foam!

When I went to graduate school for a degree in museology, I learned things I never expected. Like about foam. You know how foam on, say, those headphones from 1987 crumbles right off and is gross and disgusting. That foam is what will call unstable foam.

Appropriate foams for museum purposes are pretty stable. That is, they don't break down as much over time. In fact, we use things that aren't supposed to break down at all, or very very slowly. When materials break down, they release gases which we usually don't notice because they usually don't affect us. But if you put a very fragile old object on materials that break down (like that gross old foam), the gases and acids given off by unstable material can cause the object it's touching to discolor or grow weaker.

My original point was meant to be this: My supply orders are beginning to roll in, and I have some foam!



That's 6 planks of 2" think ethafoam. Useful stuff. Also in the picture are nitrile gloves and an acid free box. But there's more!



Let's see, that's more nitrile gloves, acid-free lignin-free file folders and paper, cotton tying tape, and some good old aluminum foil. Aluminum foil? What's that for?

Well, remember what I said about foam decaying and giving off gases? Wood does that too. A lot of our current storage space is made up of pressed board wood shelves, which is wood plus nasty chemicals. Currently, most shelves have a layer of paper on them on which the objects sit, but it's possible that those gases and unpleasant things released by the wood could migrate right through the paper. So I plan to lay a layer of aluminum foil between the paper and the shelf. Aluminum foil makes a barrier that the gases can't penetrate, at least not so easily. That's the story on aluminum foil!

I'm still waiting on two rolls of 1/8" thick ethafoam, and a roll of acidfree, unbuffered tissue paper. What's unbuffered? Let's save that for another day. And maybe another day I can tell you all about the kinds of foam I know. :D