Week Five

I was a little busy this weekend getting a portfolio organized for a job application (which involved teaching the knob man at Fedex how US addresses work and why a museum would have a PO Box), which threw my usual schedule out the window. I'm just starting to catch up now, so you will have to excuse that I am only now updating you on last week.

It was a fairly oddball week. I worked on my research project, which is the beginning of a study on long-term costume mounts (aka: the mannequin paper). I’ve got most of the research done and now I’m e-mailing conservators at museums around the world to see if they will tell me about their mannequins. The results so far have been quite good and I’ve heard from more people that are strangers than people my supervisor or I actually know. The conservator at the Canadian Museum of Civilization gets top marks for spontaneously wanting to mail me a package about their mount making process- even though I don’t know her! I’ve also (hopefully) scored myself a short tour of the costume mounting department at the V&A (check my ‘Epic Museum of Stuff’ post for details how much I love that museum)!

 I also spent two days stitching a protective net overlay to the end of Queen Anne’s counterpane (which is called a bedspread to you and me). It’s part of one of the beds at Hampton Court; this one was made during 1714-1715 and is an intricate velvet design that has badly degraded with time. This treatment is high tech because instead of using plain net that is one colour (which is standard practice) Hampton Court has started using net that is digitally printed with the fabric’s pattern on it. This means that the pattern stays crisp (one colour net causes a hazy look) and helps enhance the motifs where they are badly degraded.

The reason this technique is so new is that it is very hard to manufacture, since it is very very very hard to keep a single image of the entire area to be treated printed on a thin piece of net without it going off-register somewhere. The counterpane area is small enough and only the central section of the end needs the netting, so the registration is not such a big deal. Two of the conservators have written a paper on the technique and will present it at an international conference later in the year. I’ve only heard of one other place that has attempted this treatment, so it is a pleasure to be working with it.

And I managed to work on the documentation from Bed Clean on Friday, which is what I was supposed to spend the entire week doing. So much for the best laid plans!