Baskets and How We Store Them

This last academic quarter I had the opportunity to teach a class in the Museum Studies program here at Central Washington University. While I work with students as interns all the time, teaching a class was a whole new experience. I had the privilege of teaching a course on Registration and Collections Management, which is what I do every day!

My goal for the course was to teach the students practical fundamentals, and what better way to do that than with hands on projects? The basket collection was an immediate candidate. The baskets are beautiful and likely to be handled frequently for exhibit and research. The students were tasked with a four part assignment: Complete a catalog form, a condition report, rehouse and support the basket, and enter the information they gathered into the museum database.


The rehoused baskets on carts.

All students were required to make a custom sized box from archival cardboard and support the basket if necessary. Many of the baskets chosen for the project are wide, shallow baskets for which we needed to construct supports to help prevent the sides from slumping. Gravity is a mighty foe which must be fought with….

…custom carved blocks of ethafoam.

Carving foam to match the curve of a basket proved to be a very tricky proposition, but the students were up to the task. Not all baskets required such specific mounts. Some were fine without external supports.


This flat bottomed basket is very stable as it is. A handling tray lined with ethafoam prevents sliding and accidental bumping into other baskets on shelves.


This unique piece was too nearly flat for the sort of carved supports which worked best for other items, but small bumpers made of ethafoam tube cut length wise was just about perfect for supporting the basket and preventing movement in the box.
Some pieces, however, proved too difficult to build a mount for in the limited class time dedicated to the project and stop-gap measures were put in place.


The ring at the base of this basket prevents the basket from shifting in the box and more equally distributes the stress at the base, but does nothing to alleviate warping that may already be occurring due to gravity. This basket will receive further attention before going back into storage.

Through this assignment, 16 baskets from the collection were thoroughly documented and now have housing which will protect them for years to come. Additionally, 16 museum studies students now have the experience of creating a custom storage mount for important museum objects. I declare that to be a success all around.

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!

Class Project, part 1

One of the really neat things about having a museum as part of a university, particularly a university with a museum studies program, is that students have a chance to participate in the collections work. Every year, the museum studies program offers a class on curation and collections management. As part of that class, the students choose an object to research, catalog, and rehouse, if appropriate.

This year, the students are working on a collection of textiles. The textiles have not been researched or housed. In fact, when they were moved last year, they were in a stack in a box. That stack was transferred to the compactor storage, where it's stayed for the last year.


To prepare for class today, I took the textiles from storage and laid them out in the collections workroom. The students each choose a piece to research and rehouse.


I'm really glad the class will be working with these textiles. They need new storage - the flat storage is putting a lot of stress on the fibers, particularly on the knit pieces, which are meant to be three dimensional. I'm also glad these pieces are being examined, because I discovered that the ink used to mark the pieces is fading, in some cases quite badly.


So I'll be replacing those labels that are fading before we finish this project completely. It should be very interesting to see what sort of information the students can find on these pieces.

Tips and Techniques Thursday: Support for Objects with Round Bottoms

So much for succinct blog post titles, eh? In the spirit of weekly features which may or may not be posted every week, I present to you Tips and Techniques Thursday. As museum activity accelerates (we move at the end of March), we're working to stabilize objects prior to packing.



This week I worked on housing two buckets with rounded bottoms. The rounded bottoms mean that they can wobble as they sit on the shelf, potentially impacting other objects, but also putting pressure on a limited number of areas on the bottom. Meaning that some parts of the bottom could become more worn than others. So what to do about it?

You will need:
-A foam knife
-A safe cutting surface
-A hot glue gun and glue sticks
-Foam tri rod

Step one: Using an appropriate length of tri-rod foam, cut several triangle insets a couple of inches apart. Form into a ring to see if more cut insets are necessary.


Step two: Using the hot glue gun, form the rod into a ring and glue the ends together. Hold the ends together for half a minute or so; the rod wants to return to a straight form, so holding it is important.


Step three: If there is glue extruding at the join, trim it off or cover it with a piece of tyvek. Set object on ring.


Now the pressure is evenly distributed along the bottom edge of the bucket, and it is less likely to wobble and impact other objects. I borrowed this method from the National Museum of the American Indian.