 Hi, I'm Dr. Bernay S. Anderson and I'm thrilled to be here to help you get some knowledge about what to do when you need to wet salvage something. First of all, we need to talk about safety. Please be sure to check out our safety video, which will give you information on how to keep yourself safe. Because you have something that has been damaged by water, you need to do an assessment. Does it make sense for you to salvage the object? Consider the value of the object. Also consider how damaged the object may be. You may not know what was in the water, what types of chemicals were in the water that have impacted your precious treasure. You also may have to consider that maybe raw sewage wound up impacting your object. So consider if it's worth the time because it will take time to go through this, not to discourage you, but to give you something honestly to think about. So in terms of safety, first of all, you're going to want to make sure you have some gloves. Get the nitrile gloves powder free. You're going to want these as your first line of defense to keep your hands safe. You will also want to consider if there's mold, you're going to need a mask if there's mold. You're also going to need protective glasses. Mold is not your friend. And I will tell you while I do the video, typically I would wear a mask, but so that you can hear me clearly, I will not wear a mask in the video. But I will be wearing gloves. I'm going to put on my gloves and I'm going to check to see if adding water to the object is going to be a good thing because if it continues to lose color, then you're not going to want to do that. So I'm going to slightly wet either a Q-tip or a little sponge and I'm going to lightly dab or run it over the areas of color. And I'm going to test all of the areas to see if more color is going to move or change. I have a small spot of red. So what that means is that I'm still going to have trouble losing color on this one object. I'm not going to re-wet this object, but I recommend that you take a nice clear photo of the object. I also recommend that you use the recording feature on maybe your phone so that you can record what it is in your memories and put that treasure aside. If it's extremely precious to you, consider freezing it and calling an expert to help see if they can help you salvage it. There may be costs associated with that. So if you're going to freeze it, you're going to want to use freezer paper. Freezer paper goes in the freezer. That's why it's freezer paper, not the parchment, just the freezer or the typical wax. You want freezer bags, you're going to need a marker. I recommend that you get some blue tape to write on. You're going to want to label the bag that you put in the freezer. Freezing your object will not make it better. It will just hold it in the current state until you can have time or an expert work on it for you. Enter leave if you have to fold to protect it and place it, as I said, in the bag, put it in the freezer and then wait until you can work with an expert. Now I have another treasure. This piece here, it got wet and it's dried in this state. I don't know if I can actually get it to lay flat again. But I'm going to test this to see if it's color fast and I'm going to check every color. The blue may not run, but the red may run and then you'll be in trouble. Great. There is no transfer of color, so it is safe for me to rewash or rewet this textile. Your wet textiles are heavier after they get wet. They also are more fragile. So the weight of them may actually cause damage to the pieces, so you want to support it. I have a screen mesh here. It's just plastic screen mesh that you can get from a hardware store. Not the metal, it rust. So what I'm going to do is support my textile and then I'm going to put it in the cleaning solution, which is just distilled water. We don't want to add any additional chemicals. We're going to want it to be in here for a bit. We're going to gently encourage it to get thoroughly soaked and to start to release some of those folds. I can start to manipulate it to get it to lay flat and to open up so I can start to remove any debris that could be trapped, mud or dirt or other things. And the goal is to clean it as well as you can, however, you never wring it or put undue pressure on it. So using this mesh screen, I could put it in my first bath, pick it up, let this water drip through and move it to the next bath. And you repeat this as often as you need to to remove as much debris as you need to and as much dirt. And so I like a three bath wash and I look at it and if it's not as clean as I need it or desire for it to be, I will start over and I will continue until I get it to its cleanest state. After it comes out of the bath, I'm actually going to use towels to help me remove the moisture. Remember don't wring it. I can move it over to my towels, gently remove it from the screen, move the screen away and carefully open up the pieces so that they lay flat. This happens to be a pretty small textile. It's not very large, but don't worry, I'll give you tips, hints and guidelines on what to do if you have a full-size quilt that you need to work on. So to help control any loss or change of color, use some cheesecloth and put the cheesecloth over your quilt and then I want you to cover it with another white towel and then you can gently use the paint roller brush to push the water out of the textile because remember we cannot wring it. So this is how we remove water from a textile and then you want to check it to see how well it's doing. You also want to check your cheesecloth. There's no color added to the cheesecloth, that's very good news. And so that's how you remove water from a textile after you've washed it. You may also move it to a dry space on the towel or use new towels and continue to push the water out and all that's great. Now you want to know how do you dry it so that there's no problems. You have a couple of ways to dry it. Pipe insulation and the great thing about pipe insulation is there's a slit in the pipe insulation so you can put it over the edge of a chair and drape your textile. You also can use it to help you move a larger quilt or a larger textile. That would be a two-person move, don't try that on your own. What you want to do is get it to a state where it can dry with air. It's okay to have a fan in the room but never put a fan on your object. Use the fan to circulate the air in the room. You could also use a drying rack and these are excellent because the airflow will allow the textile to dry from the top and the bottom at the same time. These work really well. So you may have a question on what you need to do. If you have a full-size quilt, you have a large bedspread. This is what you would do. If the weather is good and clear, you can actually do this outside. You can get a large board and put a tarp on it, elevate it so it's at a slant and then you can gently rinse your textile with a hose. You don't want to be close. You don't want to use a lot of pressure but you're going to let the water run over it to help remove the debris and whatever's in it. You can do that and then what would also be helpful is that if you have a tarp that you can raise or a canopy that you can put over it, you can leave it outside to dry if the weather is good and allows. You want to protect it from the sun because the sun can actually bleach the color out of it and so you don't want to do that. So cover it up, let the air blow through and help it dry and then you can bring it back in when you're done. Something you should always consider is where you're going to store your textile after you've cleaned it and after it's dried. What do you do with it? You could put it in a white pillowcase that is soft to help store. That helps with air circulation. You could also put it in an archival box and you can pad it out with paper, white paper towels we prefer because the beautiful towels with the prints on them and the color can sometimes transfer so plain white paper towels are best. You can also use archival tissue paper to pad out the folds. That helps prevent creases from forming in your textile when you store it in a box or in a pillowcase. How do you prevent this for the next time? So let's consider how this could have happened, weather. There's nothing you can do about that. But you need to consider areas in your house. Do you have places that are prone to flooding? Do they collect moisture? Are they problematic? And so don't store your objects there or your treasures. Get a higher location to place things if you have issues with water coming in from below. Store it up high. Also make sure that you have an opportunity to use different storage materials or containers that will support this. If you're going to use a bin for storage and it happens to be plastic, consider adding desiccant packets to help control the moisture that could accumulate inside. And also just be very careful and check your treasures ever so often to make sure they are okay. I hope I've given you encouragement and enough information so that you can do some of the wet salvage you may desire for items that have been impacted from a disaster or an incident. To get help salvaging your treasure, go to culturalheritage.org and look for the Find a Professional tab. That's where you can get help.