Week Seven

This week was exciting- I had a change of scenery and got to spend most of my week at the Tower of London.

Specifically, I was in the Royal Fusiliers Museum, which looks like this.

Technically, the Fusiliers building is not owned by Historic Royal Palaces (who runs the Tower and Hampton Court) but we are helping the regiment re-do their museum. They received a big grant to completely change their small museum and it will be opening in April. I will be spending the next few weeks telling you about the costume mounting I get to do for them.

This week I did surface cleaning, which is a technical name for careful vacuuming, on most of the textile objects that will be going on display in the museum. For the most part, I worked with hats and the more modern uniforms that are going on display. I also assembled the four mannequins that the modern uniforms will be displayed on and tried them out to see if there were any problems... and I found some. One of the uniforms is way too small for the mount (so they will find a new one) and all of the museum artifact boots interfere with the mannequin’s leg mount. So the regiment will find us some new boots that can be cut up, which is the only way to show the mannequin wearing boots.

One of the unique aspects of my week was the room I worked in. The window is right next to the entrance of a tower, so members of the public could peek in and see the work I was doing.

Some tourists took photos of me. I even managed to wave to a shy little girl who was fascinated with me. And since it is half term break (their version of March break) it was very busy at the Tower.

Friday I had the pleasure of visiting the costume mounting department of the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) for my research project. For all the non-museum people reading my blog, this is a *huge* privilege because the V&A has the resources that most museums long for, so they get to put on some of the biggest exhibitions and have pioneered some new costume mounting techniques in the past few years. I can also say with some pride that they have adopted using rare-earth magnets to mount textiles, which is a practice that started being used in Canada (although it’s harder to get them in England- there’s no Lee Valley to buy them from). These tiny magnets are powerful enough to hold up textile artifacts with the added bonus that you don’t have to stitch the garment onto the costume mount, so in the end it’s a less invasive way to display it (but you can’t mount a garment using only magnets, some stitching is still required, but every little bit helps).

Overall, I would say it has been a very productive week.