 Please go ahead and begin whenever you're ready Susan. Hi everyone, nice to have you here. And so we're going to start. Connecting to Collections is a program that developed from Connecting to Collections Care developed out of Connecting to Collections. And we still do basically the same things they did, but our concentration is on Caring for Collections. So there are lots and lots of resources and many things that you can do with our website. So be sure to check it out. We have resources that you can look at. We have a discussion forum that you need to register for and there are over 120 webinar recordings that you can access at the website. And you can keep up with what we're doing on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. And if you don't get the C2CC announce hostings, go to this website and you can sign up or you can send me a message. This is my email and I'll sign you up. I'd be happy to do that. And coming up next month, we're going to do something on Caring for Maps and Architectural Drawings. And then in April and May, we're doing a series on legal issues in Collections Management with ARCs. And so keep looking at the website. Those advertisements should be posted soon. And now I'm going to turn this over to our speaker for today, Camille Breeze. And I'm going to let her introduce herself. So remember, if you have questions, I'm going to be watching for them. I'll grab them and so that they don't get lost. Put them in the questions comments box and then we'll answer questions at the end. So thanks. And Camille, take it away. Hello everybody and welcome to this Connecting to Collections Care webinar, Practical Solutions for Quilt Care and Display. As Susan mentioned, my name is Camille Myers-Breeze and I'm the director and chief conservator of Museum Textile Services. We are at Textile Conservation Studio in Andover, Massachusetts. My staff and I work with individuals, cultural heritage institutions, and government agencies, which probably catches most of you. And I also teach widely, including summer classes at the International Preservation Studies Center, previously known as the Campbell Center. I'll also be presenting a webinar on caring for textiles during Preservation Week through the American Library Association, which I see some of you are in the library field. One sec. Okay. Throughout my presentation, I'll be showing you screenshots from my website, www.museumtextiles.com. Most of what you'll see are free MTS handouts from the website. I want you to feel free to go to the resources section of the website and take all the handouts that you want, reproduce them, do anything that you want with them. They're all divided into categories here, so they're pretty easy to find. You may also enjoy reading the MTS blog. We happen to have one on Quilts Up right now. And also on our educational opportunities in the outreach section, you'll see different places that we will be presenting or teaching. If you want to get in touch with me about any textile conservation topic, you can do it through the website. We have a contact form here, or you can email at info at museum textiles.com. And I also want to encourage you to follow us on social media and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram at hashtag museum textiles. So without further delay, here is the big question of the day. What is a quilt? I define a quilt in the simplest way possible as a textile constructed of two or more layers of fabric connected by stitching. So I'm sure you can think of much more complicated descriptions of what a quilt is or more specifically what a quilt is not, but I think this basically breaks it down into its simplest part. A quilt may be very large like the AIDS quilt, which is a series of quilts, or it may be very small like this little doll's quilt from about 1870 or so. A quilt can be made by hand or by a machine. A quilt can be made of many, many pieces or just a few like this quote unquote whole cloth quilt from Wales. Of course it's more than one piece, but it's just lengths of base fabric heavily quilted. Some quilts have a lot of thick batting and some have none like this quilt top, which some purists might say isn't really a quilt. It's just a quilt top. And just for the record, I don't recommend that you photograph your quilt tops out on your gravel driveway. A quilt can be assembled by piecing like this log cabin quilt is, or by applique also called Brodery Purse like this very archetypal Baltimore album quilt, or sometimes by a combination of both techniques as in this crazy quilt. Quilts are often the chosen medium for artists like this beautiful piece called Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold. And other times quilts inadvertently become works of art like this working clothes quilt by Loretta P. Bennett, who's one of the quilters of G's Bend. Some quilts contain intricate networks of stitching that is arguably where the term quilt comes from. And some employ thread ties to connect their layers. Some quilts aren't connected at all throughout the body like this little Nantucket quilt that you're going to see again and again throughout our presentation. When you look on the back, you don't see any stitches. No stitches connecting. They're only connected at the layers only connected at the perimeter. Some quilts are quilts in technique only like this astonishing quilted woman's petticoat from the 18th century. And we often call things quilts that aren't quilts in all. One example being this yo-yo quilt as they're called, which are little purses of fabric toned together at the perimeter, but not technically a quilted piece. But fortunately, the techniques we're going to talk about today will be applicable to lots of things other than quilts. Things like coverlets, counterpains, bedspreads, wall hangings, other things like that. So however you define a quilt, this webinar should be a fun journey into the world of preservation. So let's start at the very beginning with a review of how all collections-based projects begin with documentation. Before you alter a textile held in your collection, you need to gather all the information you can from as many sources as you can. And these include any donation records if it's been catalogued before, photographs including current photographs and historical photographs like I found of this, the woman who owned this little outfit. Genealogy records are often really helpful. We have a big library because we have to search through textile and costume history references to find out things that are published that reference our object. Also, an understanding of technology is very helpful, roller printed versus block printed fabric and a quilt, for example. And what the documentation can often do is help you pinpoint a date range. Sometimes this confirms the date that was given with the object, but more often than not, we find the information we dig up through documentation will actually disprove the story behind the artifact. You want to record the information that you collect in some kind of form. Perhaps you use a database that's specific to your institution or perhaps you use past perfect. We developed a document that's simply a word table. You can do this in Google Docs also. We take this basic form and we alter it whenever we can. Sometimes we alter it for a specific job. Maybe it's all World War II uniforms we're looking at. And in this case, this is one specifically made of quilts, made for documenting quilts. Again, it's very easy to do this. This particular condition report, both the blank one and the filled out one are available in the resources section of my website, which I'll show you in a minute. And the thing that I like most before starting a documentation project is to establish your lexicon of terms. Whether it's just you doing this work or you have a group of people, you want to start out by defining the terms you're all going to use. This list is very much a conservation term list. It distinguishes between a crease and a wrinkle or a stain and discoloration. But you might want to make a document, a sample condition term list about different technical things that apply to what you're documenting. We find then that the occasions where you're looking for something like a quilt in your past perfect, for example, and you come up with bedspreads because somebody's called it a quilt. You can streamline that and reduce the number of errors if you establish your lexicon ahead of time. Once documentation is underway, you can better define the scope of treatment by asking this question. What are your goals for your quilt? Is it just going into a study collection where maybe people will practice conservation techniques on it or take it out and maybe copy it? Is it going to be just a research tool perhaps? It's in poor condition, but it is very historical, so researchers might want to come and see it. Many of us are interested in exhibiting quilts, so is that one of the goals of this project? Or are you looking at this quilt now because somebody has asked to take it out on a loan? All these situations are very common. And the scope of treatment will of course reflect what the immediate goal is. It might need to be cleaned, maybe it just has come in and you're going to re-house the quilt, or maybe it requires some stabilization, and as we said, maybe it just requires some kind of display solution. So depending on the scope of your treatment, you may need to speak to a conservator. And if you're not already familiar with it, this is the home page of the American Institute for Conservation's website. And there's a find a conservator button up in the top left. You can search in your geographic area. You can even get really specific and just look under terms like quilt under textile conservation. So you can cast a broad net or a very specific one. And whether you need some advice or you need to hire a consulting conservator, the people on this list are all extremely professional and will all be happy to speak with you. So I'm going to discuss with you four aspects of quilt treatment that I believe that all collections care staff can learn to do safely. And the first of those is surface cleaning. This is a great way to know when, I want you to know when and how to surface clean things like pollutants and other particulate matter using a vacuum. So there's a handout on my website that you see pictured right here. And it goes into the equipment that you can use and the techniques you use to safely vacuum things like quilts. It does not take a $2,000 NILFISC vacuum or even an expensive HEPA filter attachment. You can achieve the same results with a $300 canister vacuum like a melee that has an excellent standard onboard filter already and a simple $10 microattachment kit which you see photographed here. What few collections professionals know is that textile conservators almost never vacuum through a screen. If I took a poll right now and I said, who was taught how to vacuum through a screen? I'm sure a lot of you would raise your hands. But dust, possible insects, even new damage from exhibition that are detected through vacuuming are often obscured when you are vacuuming through a screen. So you will be able to read through this handout, download it and find all sorts of nifty techniques like that. You always want to vacuum on a clean surface large enough to accommodate your textile. Sometimes that surfaces the floor and you have to put plastic down. You often will need to ask for help. Quilts are very big things. One of the hardest parts about vacuuming a quilt is keeping track where you have and haven't vacuumed because you're not just vacuuming off dirt that you can see. A lot of what you're vacuuming off are very small particles that and you can't tell the difference between the clean and the dirty areas. But this simple act of surface cleaning can save you from, for example, spreading a moth or carpet beetle problem from the public galleries where something has been on display, near windows and doors into your storage area. You want to vacuum with the largest attachment that is suitable for the textile in its condition. Here you see us vacuuming a very stable tapestry and we're using a large flat attachment. If you're doing something more delicate as you'll see in our video in a moment, you use a smaller attachment. The handout will help you walk you through how to make that decision. So what I'd like to do now is, before we go to the, sorry, Mike. The other half of this photograph on the slide shows surface cleaning with a vulcanized rubber sponge. And I want to mention that there are more techniques other than vacuuming for surface cleaning such as vulcanized rubber sponges, chamois, or even just some cotton flannel. And you can do damage to the surface of a textile, I think more easily than with a vacuum, if you don't know what you're doing. So before you undertake additional types of surface cleaning, I think you should speak to a conservator or another specialist who has experience doing that because they are handy techniques but they require a little bit of training. Okay, Mike, can you please have our first video? So here I am vacuuming a very nice silk quilt. It's in good condition, there are no losses, but it is silk and it's old. So I've got my Miele canister vacuum on which I've put a microattachment kit. I'm using the oval bristle brush. I'm picking up and putting down, picking up and putting down. And that way eventually you'll get your quilt all cleaned. And here I am on the back of the same quilt and I've got a larger attachment. I've adjusted my suction and this is the most delicate tool I need. It'll take me way too much time to do it with a tiny tool. And you can see I'm using my hand here to know where I vacuum, but otherwise I can use a pin or a piece of tool tape or something. But keeping track of where you've been is sometimes the biggest challenge. So another thing you see in that picture is that we're not wearing gloves. I doubt there are many textile conservators who wear cotton gloves, except maybe when the curator comes around. If we are working with something dirty, we're more likely to wear a nitrile or a latex glove. But I'm a big fan of super clean hands washed throughout the day. And this way if you have something dirty on your object, you're going to see it on your hands. And it's going to allow you to judge very carefully with using your fingertips, which are such important tools. Okay, but before we completely leave the subject of cleaning, I just want to bring up that here is the resources page, textile conservation basis, that's what it's called. And it has the sample condition report, the blind condition report, it has the conditioning terms and it also has the vacuuming handout. Some of you might be thinking right now, well, what about wet cleaning quilts? And I'm here to say unless you've received training and you have experience in wet cleaning quilts, please don't undertake it. Never wash a quilt without some kind of guidance, because fugitive dyes, fragile fabrics, and unpredictable behavior of large multi-layered quilts like, textiles like quilts, they can be harmed during the wet cleaning process even when precautions are taken. So please bear that in mind next time you consider throwing your white quilt in the bathtub with oxy-clean or something like that. Okay, stabilization or repair can also be undertaken by collection staff as long as a few core principles are followed. All stabilization must be reversible. That your stitches and any fabrics you use must do no harm to the textile upon application or upon removal. I also want to mention here that restoration or reversing changes over time to bring a textile back to perceived idea of what it used to look like or used to be like. This is very, very, very done by museum conservators. Instead, we stabilize an item to enable it to fulfill its goal as a study or a display object. So an excellent method of stabilizing textiles is using an overlay and an overlay is defined as a sheer material placed on the object surface with the goal of changing the appearance and or protecting the object. Here you see me with a tallot, a prayer shawl that I'm encapsulating in net. There are three materials often used for overlays on textile conservation and I'll refer you to the AIC Wiki and you can read all about them. But the three categories are silk including sheer silk capoline, net which comes in nylon silk and cotton or polyester shears including stable text which is now called Tetex and other polyester shears. But for the purposes of the webinar today I'm just going to concentrate on nylon net. These are the reasons that nylon net is my favorite overlay material. It has very good transparency and also drape. It doesn't unravel. You can cut, after you've sewn an area you can cut your edges tight and they will never unravel. Materials like silk capoline, you have to do a rolled edge and polyester stable text, you sometimes hot cut it. Enormous time is put into just finishing the edges but that's not the case with nylon net. It's also commercially available in literally an endless array of colors although I would say 75% of the netting we do is with this antique gold color that you see there. It's amazing, it blends with everything. And if you need to you can easily dye nylon net yourself that doesn't require expensive equipment. Nylon net is also available in wide width so if we have to net the entire top or bottom of a quilt we can do it in one solid piece which saves time. And also net is like $2 a yard. It's pretty unbeatable. It's a great material. The things that people don't like about nylon net are that it does have some sheen. It stretches more in one direction than another so you should be conscious if you're netting something that's going to bear weight. For example you want to try to put it with the stretchy direction going sideways, not up and down. People are concerned that silk can be abrasive, sorry net can be abrasive which is true if you're handling your object in a negative way. It's also susceptible to light damage. It will fail if it's in a window but you should not be putting your textiles in a susceptible place anyway. So I think that that argument kind of goes the way of the wind. So by color matching a washed and iron piece of high quality not sparkly kind of net you can protect a vulnerable area on a quilt like this so that it's sound enough to endure handling an exhibition. You can't even probably tell but the picture on the left has no net and the picture on the right has like a pink colored net. Imagine if you were to take a piece of color matching solid cotton and get through the interstices on this piece and actually do an underlay, you were skilled enough to do that and then you put an overlay between the color compensating underlay and the sheer overlay. You can make this block look like there's almost no damage. So if that is within the goal of your treatment scope net is a great way to do that. Mike, could we please see the first of our netting videos? So this shows you just how to put net on a vulnerable block on a quilt. Here's our little Nantucket quilt. So we've actually got a little underlay already there under a hole and now Morgan is pinning out a piece of antique gold net and she's not pulling it too tight, she's just smoothing it and letting it lay flat. She's pinning it on all four directions so that it's not going to shift. The next thing she's doing is she's sewing in the ditch around the perimeter of that weak block. She's using a curved needle. This one happens to be from colonial needles, a curved beading needle and we always work with cotton thread except occasionally we'll use a thin polyester but the general rule is cotton. We have decided on this quilt since it has no stitching on the back. All our stitching must float in the middle. None of our stitching goes to the back of the quilt. That makes it very hard. Morgan's left a tail there. Once she goes around the perimeter of that diamond she's going to be able to come right back, tie to her tail and then bury her tail, needle them up and pull them through the middle layers. So it went by really quickly but let me just reinforce that sometimes you would sew around the perimeter of a block like this pink diamond shaped block going all the way through to the back of the quilt and other times you won't. Crazy quilts, you can almost always see that the perimeter of all the blocks on a crazy quilt are mirrored in the perimeter stitching on the back. In that case, it's pretty easy for a conservator to sew all the way through, capture all the layers of the quilt and have that stitch not stand out and not be ugly for people that are looking at the back. Not be confusing to people on the back. So that's a repair stitch. Other times, which is not to go all the way through to the back. It's really on a case by case basis. So if Mike is going to queue up the other netting video and we're going to show you the slight differences when you're netting an edge, binding is so often a weak area on a quilt. So we take the same nylon net and in this case we have a long skinny piece we've cut off a bolt of brown net and Morgan has it, she's going to sew it around. Not too tight. Again, just tight enough so that it's not bagging. It doesn't stick out. She's pinning in the ditch there. Again, that ditch is created where the line of stitching around the binding is held onto the quilt. And after she stitches it in place, she's going to start at one end or start at the middle and she's going to sew it. If more than one person is working, you want to start in the middle and end up with a surplus in the middle. So here's Morgan, she's sewing with a straight needle this time and we're using a running back stitch. I'm taking a forward stitch of about a half an inch float on the back. There she is making her half inch float coming up in the ditch and then she's making a small 16th of an inch back stitch. So we call that a running back stitch so people will call that a back stitch. How do you know how big your stitches should be? My goal is to use the biggest stitch as possible and this case the goal is to keep the net around the vulnerable area and prevent fragments from falling out. So in my rule of thumb is if you can stick your pinky in between your stitches that's probably a little bit too big so you want it to be too small for your pinky to get under. If you're using more stitches like quilters, the goal is to make as many stitches as possible. Quilt conservation, the goal is to use as few stitches as possible to avoid that natural quilting tendency to make lots and lots of tiny stitches. Big floats on the back, small things on the front. I mentioned very quickly that we use cotton and almost all of our stitching either a goonerman or a mentler, cotton. We'll always use one strand. We don't use two if you need to use two for some application you would use a thicker thread like a button and cracked. So we're going to move on now I see lots of questions coming through. That's great, we'll talk about it in the questions period. We have a very detailed handout on conservation netting on the website that you will all enjoy reading through. It has step by step instructions on how to do what we just taught you. I hope that you will download that and have a good look at it and then practice some netting. The techniques work both on quilts and other things. There is also a sheer overlay resource. Sorry, there is a sheet on sheer overlay supplies and I haven't pictured it here but in the resources section of my website there's one category that's called Ipsi resources IPSC resources and under that there's a page for sheer overlays. That's where all the handouts for my classes at the Campbell Center the International Preservation Study Center that's where all of their handouts are and the fly list where I get the materials is hidden down in there. I'm sorry that I didn't put it in my presentation. The next subject that we're going to talk about is exhibition. Most of you will have experience putting displays together though you may have been discouraged by the challenges of exhibiting large textiles like quilts. Quilts and other textiles are most often displayed in one of these manners. Flat, like inside of a case deck. On a board or a slant board is also a very popular way to exhibit things. If the quilt is small enough it might go in a frame or in a shadow box. The majority of quilts we put on display are displayed from a pole if they have a sleeve or a velcro or magnetic slat. We'll talk a little bit more about. In addition you need to think about the method of attachment and the way that the textile is going to be tapped within that display. If you're displaying something in a case deck like the shoes and the baby onesie in this display case it's passive. They're just sitting on the case deck. Maybe there's mylar underneath them in a perfect world and maybe there isn't. We also have pins. Sometimes big fabric covered boards or slant boards are employed for quilts. In that case you can simply pin them in around the top edge in a few other key areas and state customers, for example, do it. More often we are using stitching as a method of attachment. We have to stitch a sleeve onto the top back edge of a quilt or we are stitching a velcro header to the back of the quilt. Sometimes like a small quilt might go into a frame and we might just hold it with pressure which is kind of like a passive method. No stitching is necessary. More often than not now we have foregoing velcro hanging systems which we've been advocating for the last 25 years or so in favor of a magnetic slat system and it uses an old fashioned sleeve just like a pole and then a magnetic slat that we get from small corp. If people are interested in more information about small corp they can get that from me. So a lot of these handouts that I've just been showing you are in the resources part of my web page and in the resources section. There are tons more than what I've showed you on here like for example these two making installing a velcro header point-by-point directions on how to attach velcro to a fabric like twill tape or cotton to place it on the back of your textile along the true horizontal which is rarely the same thing as the top edge. I think we all know top edges of quilts are often not straight so this handout will tell you how to put your velcro across the invisible magic horizontal access at the top edge and then also how to get around the challenges of actually maneuvering a large object like a quilt how to get it on the wall safely things like that. So we have one last little video for you if Mike could queue it up and what this video is showing you is I'm sewing a sleeve of a quilt. It's a fairly straight forward procedure what I'm using is three inch wide twill tape cotton twill tape I've lined the top of the twill tape up with the ditch of that little quilt you saw a minute ago and I'm sewing through that ditch and it's coming about an eighth inch down from the top of the quilt and then about two and a half inches down from there is the first line of blocks the first natural ditch on the front I'm going to sew through that ditch so even though I've got three inch twill tape the channel that the magnetic slat system is going to go through on this is just going to use the top two and a half inches you can use twill tape you can use a you know a tube of fabric anything like that but the stitches that I'm using are just like what I was pointing out before the fewest stitches possible in this case we've got about a half an inch float all eighth or sixteenth inch back stitch on the ditch that's just the way I like it some people might be wondering why use a back stitch instead of just a running stitch if you do a long extensive running stitch and something should catch one of your stitches they will just gather your object up like a drawstring so the benefit of a back stitch is that phenomenon won't happen if you catch a fingernail or something on your half inch float it's only going to pull that last little stitch that's one of the reasons that we really like back stitches the final aspect of quilt care that I'm going to present is rehousing or storage there are three types of storage that are frequently used for quilts specifically for quilts one of those is flat storage a small quilt that I guess conceivably could go on a shelf in a cabinet or something like that if you're thinking right now stacking 10 quilts on a bed constitutes flat storage I would say that it doesn't I believe that display is never a storage solution whether it's leaving a dress on a mannequin for 20 years or leaving a bunch of quilts on a bed that's not a storage solution in my book all textiles have to come off display and rest in a dark stable environment free from gravity, ventilation and the risks of visitors may be an exception to that rule would be upholstered furniture some floor coverings perhaps a fancy set of bed hangings but these are generally only displayed in a controlled environment with regular housekeeping and professional care the other methods of storage are box storage and rolled storage so what determines whether a textile is boxed, rolled hung or stored in say a flat file like this well I would argue that the size of the object is the first thing that dictates that if you have a flat storage unit like this and a bunch of small art quilts that are say 2x3 this would be an excellent storage solution for that otherwise we generally have to think between boxed or rolled I find that institutional policy often drives whether a collection of quilts is rolled or it is put in boxes the person who made the decision is done is the one who decides whether it is rolled or boxed and some of us will have sort of opinions on one way or another I personally don't love rolling quilts for reasons I will show you in a little while but other people are big fans and they think that folding quilts in boxes is problematic and I respect that too your resources what money you have available if you are starting a quilt storage solution from scratch some of the other artifacts will play a role in whether they can be folded in a small box in a large box put in a box with a couple other quilts put in their own box things like this so in discussing rehousing materials I want to begin with the layer that touches the object which I call the wrapping so the basic wrapping we are all familiar with is acid free tissue it comes in buffered and unbuffered and I don't believe you should own any buffered tissue for textile conservation none technically the reason it exists it is buffered with a calcium carbonate it is slightly basic the argument and it is used in paper this way is that if you put it with a cotton quilt that is aging and acidifying it is going to slow down that process but I find that it is very easy to confuse and it is packed in a really good museum like a 100% silk crazy quilt packed in buffered tissue paper you want to avoid using a basic material like buffered tissue with a naturally acidic thing like a silk or a wool quilt we are getting a little into textile science which is not part of this talk but I would like to encourage you to never buy buffered tissue again stick to the acid free unbuffered tissue here you see ours it comes on a roll a key to the financing of your tissue is if you have it here like between a flat surface and a vertical surface you can just grab the edge pull it towards you and just rip it just practice it just rip it right off the roll gives you a beautiful torn edge I think that too many minutes of my life have been wasted cutting tissue off a roll I encourage you to learn how to do this and then we either take that tissue and say line a box with it or scrumple it up like this cotton sheeting you have it could be unbleached cotton muslin it could be bleached cotton muslin either way you want to wash it once maybe twice try no detergent try a free and clear detergent no fabric softener things like that running through you get it all washed and dried and taken out properly and you won't have to iron it and you'll get lots of mileage out of this cotton fabric as a wrapping material or a protection sometimes especially for rolling quilts you might want to use some polyester batting because it makes the angle that the quilt is rolling at that curve it makes it a little less severe and can soften something but polyester batting likes to shed little bits of fiber all of your objects so you want to put down a layer of tissue then a piece of polyester batting and then another piece of tissue make a little sandwich with it after you've packed or rolled something you might need to cover that roll and the materials we like to use Tyvek is a really good material but polyethylene sheeting is also inexpensive you can get it at the hardware store if you need to protect it for example because you're transporting it I don't recommend that you use one of these non-breatable or like low air transfer materials if you're storage unless you have a really high risk storage area you can just have the final layer be cotton fabric or tissue something like that and don't worry there's a really beautiful hand up that goes over this I can't do it justice here so box storage is my favorite way to store quilts but there's box storage and box storage so here's a beautiful handmade box and we've got these two quilts sitting in it because we're going to come back shortly we're going to treat it obviously many of the archival boxes that we use are made of acid-free cardboard it can be blue it can be tan it can be corrugated it can be not corrugated they're all pretty much the same and they have the same inherent vice which is that over time they will absorb acids and dirt and things from the environment as well as from your artifact so for the last 25 years or so a lot of Tick-Fell conservators these come in an opaque white or milky, clearish color they're 100% inert they're pH neutral and they don't off-gas over time they stay pH neutral forever unlike acid-free cardboard which acidifies there are some other pros and cons which you'll see in the handout I'll show you but I'm a big fan of polypropylene boxes especially for institutions storage conditions you can stack more of them on top of each other you can clean them off easily they're good if you are moving things in and out of the box a lot you'll notice a static charge can build up you want to be very careful of that but otherwise I'm pretty much a proponent what do you do if you've had your quilt stored in 20 old blue boxes and now somebody's giving you a donation you've bought 20 brand new polypropylene boxes all of them maybe your boxes were too full and now you're going to put half as many quilts in the boxes well a key to using old boxes and new boxes in a good way is that you can use your old boxes to store your wool and your silk quilts they are naturally more acidic and so they will be more at home in an older cardboard box and then reserve your brand new polypropylene boxes or even your brand new archival board boxes for your more vulnerable pieces like your cotton quilts and your silk quilts and you can store them in your virtual environment a little bit more than your silk and wool this goes for costume, goes for everything else I like to store things by materials and I like to reserve my older boxes for wool and silk again you're going to need your acid free and buffer tissue I like to put it inside the box to put one quilt down so you have a second quilt on top put another layer of tissue and put the second quilt so you have an organic layer like fabric or tissue in there in case say your air conditioning breaks after hurricane it's 100 degrees the temperature inside your box that's 72 or whatever your AC was said at will heat up much more slowly than the air outside the box and this dynamic can sometimes encourage condensation to occur and a very simple way to mitigate that risk is to make sure that you have a lining of muscle in your tissue in your box and which I think you would do anyway so then there's world storage and most of us are familiar with acid free tubes we can buy them from catalogs but we might not have the resources available for an acid free tube so the way you can take a standard tube from a shipping company or something you find or tubes that you are given from an architectural firm for example you can put polyethylene sheeting you can put marvel seal mylar all these materials which are in a handout that I'm going to show you you can put those around your tubes to come in the ends a little bit and you can render a free or an expensive tube suitable for world storage and you're going to want to use your acid free on buffer tissue you don't necessarily need to interleave your whole textile but we've chosen to do so here the very first pair of pictures I showed you it showed the tumbling blocks on the left and the back it showed the picture of the back of the quilt and you may have noticed it was really wrinkly because not only does this quilt have very tall batting but it's been stored rolled and so the back is just just coated with wrinkles so when we rolled it to rehouse it we made sure to place the quilt face down on tissue on the table and then we rolled it up like that that way the fabric on the back is taking the shorter turn around the track like the inner lane on the racetrack and the body of the front of the quilt is taking the gentler the wider track around the racetrack so that way any damage from wrinkling from being rolled is more likely to occur to the back of the front you can tell I don't really like seeing oh this was the solution for example this quilt had to be transported in a car and it was brought on the tube to put something like tissue or cotton or if you're traveling with it the polyethylene sheeting all of these same lovely materials that I've mentioned so here's a set of pictures to walk you through how you would prepare a quilt to get stored in a box it's all common sense and works really well in pairs so choose a nice clean environment with ample space even though this is two tables built but with two of us it's adequate if this quilt was super fragile we would probably need to do it on the floor so here we are we've chosen to fold it with the quilted side in and the lining out and then how many times you fold your quilt in one direction and then in the next direction is really decided by the size of your container remember that picture of the two quilts in the box where they're sort of swimming in this big box well here we're taking this we fold the quilt in quarters this way and then quarters in the other it's going to fit but usually keep the box on hand to help teach you how to do that so we've folded the quilt in quarters and we've used long snakes in the folds and then we have short snakes of tissue here using the box as a guide and we're just folding the quilt up on itself one after another after another and it happened to work out mathematically really nicely into this box and here you see the final box with the propylene box it's lined with unbuffered acid free tissue the quilt goes in and then the tissue gets folded the clothes and of course we have to label this box because all our boxes will look alike if we don't label it so I've just given you a lot of information I'll tell you again where to find it so this is a quilt storage guidelines handout that you can download and here is choosing the best storage materials this is a chock full of information we have two suppliers we all have our favorite suppliers no one supplier is better than another but you're going to be able to follow step by step the recommendations that you've heard me make today most of my recommendations are made with cost effectiveness as one of the driving principles it's the way my company works and certainly the way all of my clients need to work so you'll notice a lot of things while you're doing this and all of those handouts are here in textile storage in the resources section of the MTS website okay so this concludes my presentation on practical solutions for quilt care and display some of what I've told you may sound new or maybe some of the techniques I've mentioned are things you've been secretly doing all along that kind of go against what you might have been taught or what the books have told you taking advantage of resources available all collections care specialists can learn to master these few simple techniques I'd like to thank Susan Barger Mike Morneau and the FAIC which has made a huge difference in my career for presenting this webinar today and now I will happily take your questions okay so I'll read the questions and if you have other questions feel free to put them in there there were a couple of questions on what kind of pins or yes I happen to be fond of Clover brand pins and they have silk pins which are blue and yellow and then they have a slightly longer straight pin that are orange and green I don't know what they're called but those are both really good strong long lasting pins pins always start out straight and then they curve as you use them all of them do it's not that Clover don't we have certain things like if you're pinning layers of net to a quilt a bent pin is the perfect tool comes back to you so eventually try to distinguish but this box has bent pins this box has straight pins but maybe that's just me I'm just crazy about materials I think you all like supplies too so are you using long pins or you know short old fashioned straight pins whatever the length of pins it depends on a really thin very thin textile like that Nantucket quilt I showed you a lot we've been using our the silk pins by Clover which are maybe a quarter inch shorter than the green and orange pins which are the next size up okay the next question is what kind of netting do you use all of the netting I illustrated there was nylon net we had it through Joann Fabrics or Fabric.com it's absolutely a commercial net it's distinguished from the others in the store because it doesn't have sparkles on it it's not big it doesn't look like it's a tutu it's bridal tool is what it is it's the highest quality bridal tool now in addition to what you can get at a place like Joann's you can get a higher quality nylon bridal tool in that diamond pattern it is it's a heat welded product you can get that at bridal supply places and then in the sheer overlay supply list I mentioned that's on the website there are some vendors in France and in England of the highest end nylon net some conservators only die their own net but I use both kinds okay and do you trim off excess netting after stitching and if so how close do you use applique scissors for trimming I don't know what applique scissors are I don't have fancy tools let me just use the small pointy scissors for that I try not to use my thread cutting scissors to trim net because then they won't be sharp enough to cut thread so like we have a pair of fisters that's maybe three inches long and they end in a point and those are perfect for trimming net if you try to cut your net to a perfect shape you can use the scissors to trim the ditch what you'll find is it'll either shift a little bit or it'll end up being a little smaller after you've sewn it so that's why I don't cut my shapes until after I've sewn it down and it takes a little practice trimming net first of all of course you're cutting on an artifact you have to take care of when you're doing but secondly you it's a series of cells so you really just you can cut as close as the next cell over from the cell that your thread is in you can trim net from a couple blocks you'll accidentally trim too close you'll trim the cell that has your thread and then your net will pop up so after we've trimmed check real carefully and sometimes we'll have to thread up again and go and put in a few stitches and just secure a place that we've cut too close but it's still more time time efficient than treating the edge of a creepling or a sable text overlay patch so applique scissors have like a big bill on the bottom side so you can trim them under what you're trimming without getting the other thing but it sounds like that's a pretty good method with a tiny small scissors is there a good source for cotton thread the local chain fabric stores has diverserized cotton polyester wrapped cotton what kind of thread is recommended and then some of it's go to your local quilt supply store Metner and Gooderman both make a very nice cotton 100% cotton mercerized thread one of them Gooderman calls it silk finish so you have to look really carefully there'll be a big display and only like a sixth of it is the cotton ones that I'm talking about the majority of it is polyester we don't use any polyester sewing thread in textile conservation with the exception of either weight-bearing applications with a monofilament so from the majority of our work we use a cotton thread I'm sorry I don't know whether it's a number 40 or a number 50 I think the Gooderman's a 40 and the Metler's a 50 just your standard cotton sewing thread we also have a large selection of DMC mercerized cotton embroidery thread it's called machine embroidery thread it comes on a spool to distinguish it from the hand embroidery floss I think that's very hard to buy we don't use it as often and certainly never use that in any kind of weight-bearing capacity like attaching a header but as long as you use a good sewing thread that's a good amount a coat makes a nice thread too you're going to get a sense when you're sewing whether your thread is it's too aggressive it's too big, it's too chunky and you want to maybe go for a thinner thread Okay so there's a question about when you were talking about magnetic mounting and it's the question is can pressure cause damage to the textile there's so little pressure but it's occurring inside the sleeve with the magnetic system that I described to you it's very complicated it's very hard to represent fully in this capacity but what you're doing is you're putting a magnetic powder-coated thin aluminum or thin metal strip through that sleeve and then that is being magnetized to the wall to a slide on the wall so there are no magnets on the front of the textile in that application that's what we use for quilts there are other times where we use magnets on the front of a textile in an exhibition capacity but we would only do that if the textile was in art conservation especially in textile conservation but there will be a book coming out soon by Gwen Spicer that will be an excellent resource for people yeah is there a standard quilt weight to use for slant board angle ratio to go by so some kind of no everything is on a case by case basis okay I've shown a slant board and I'm oh yeah but she says she's not always getting the videos the videos will be in the recording so if you weren't able to see them they will be in the recording and Mike said that it's because of differences in people's internet speed how do you address this fabric if there is light damage that has caused the fabric to be frayed or to tear or to fade then it may render the quilt not suitable for exhibition if you're lucky you can mitigate the damage done by light exposure through stabilization techniques for example putting an overlay over every occurrence of the damage and weaken fabric that was on the window side of the bedroom for 50 years or that has a pattern where the women's legs were every day when she stepped out of bed or sat and put her slippers on we've seen all of them so the netting technique that I've showed you is adequate there is a tiny bit of color compensation to net also which sometimes you can use to your advantage if you have color change differential fading on one side versus the other the visible results from light exposure like color change are just the end of the line it's the last stage in the long and damaging procedure of light damage you are it's fundamentally weakened if you have color change and may as I said render your object a poor can state for exhibition maybe one that you take to a textile conservator okay is there a maximum amount of time that a quilt can be on display I like to say that even in the best of circumstances like at the MFA or some big museum that six months is the maximum that we aim to hang a quilt one of the things I love to do when a couple comes into my studio and they just bought a quilt and they want me to clean it and prep it to go on display in their wall is I'll say I can rotate them six months on six months off it's really better for something to be off of display for longer than six months something that's important enough to be in a museum collection but within your own house do as I say not as I do try six months on six months off I try not to leave anything on display in my own home longer than that but if something is in an exhibit and it's traveling to multiple venues or you can just go and rest for a couple of days or a week or something between venues and then come back out you really need to know that your object is sound enough to withstand that type of handling as well as that long term exhibition and often the rules of thumb are broken when somebody wants to borrow our beautiful thing and show it to the masses we'll let it be exhibited longer than we would otherwise if it's a cold-needed tissue barrier I like to start off by putting a sausage or a snake whatever you want to call it down the middle just to pad the fold but unless your quilt is in very weak condition it might either catch on itself if it has little embellishments or you might lose pieces of it unless those conditions are there you don't need to interleave it with tissue and then when people bring us things completely interleave its tissue we end up with tons of dirty tissue and it's tough I think it's unnecessary in most cases so we'll put a big sausage down the first long fold a big sausage down the second long fold and then maybe when we're folding it in the short direction maybe the first two folds get sausage and then the layers sit on top of the previous sausage so you don't really need more than that generally on the basis okay what would you recommend as a cover for wooden dowels or folds that are used for storage oh sure you need an excellent barrier material that's going to isolate the products in the wood Mylar or Melonex is the traditional one but I'm a fan of a product called Marvel Seal M-A-R-V-E-L S-E-A-L Marvel Seal is one of my conservation materials hand out along with a place where I buy it but you can find it at many of the archival supply companies it's aluminum, nylon and polypropylene blend I believe don't hold me to that and it's got a shiny silver side and then a dull silver side you can actually iron it to itself a little hard around a little dowel but you can also double stick it to itself they make a Marvel Seal tape that's a really excellent barrier in the wood and end your quilt but I'm hoping you're not actually rolling the quilt on a wooden dowel because the diameter is going to be not beneficial to the quilt why don't you try cardboard tubes that you've covered with a barrier and then run that dowel through the tube yeah avoid PVC pipe which a lot of us think is great because you can get it at Home Depot but you want to avoid that because it off gases PVC chlorine it off gases chlorine excuse me and I think something even yuckier but it also bows over time I've used it earlier in my career on a very short term quilt exhibit because it was cheap and easy and then since then I've used different methods okay do you recommend reverse rolling one face up for a while and then the other I don't see why that preventative measure that's a good idea I never thought of that if quilts are boxed how often do you refold the quilt we like to look through our study collection every two to three years to make sure that there's not some mysterious insect or mold situation going on in them and I personally don't feel compelled to refold my quilts I personally do not bother by a quilt being folded in the same place I know that over the course of 10, 20, 30 years in a museum the quilts probably going to be in a better condition than it was in a drawer or in a cabinet in somebody's house which is where we see those fold discoloration lines and fold damage lines and probably I think it's a unnecessary use of your personnel and supply resource to constantly be refolding your quilts just from a preventative measure that's my opinion how do you figure out how many quilts is too many in an acid free box what a great question so the answer is you're going to have the devil on one shoulder going go ahead put three in every box and do the math and put three quilts that's 33 boxes and then the angel is sitting on your other shoulder saying I hate pushing them down and some are weaker than others and the answer is going to be somewhere in the middle based on your resources your understanding of your collection and also the capacity to grow if you get your 33 boxes and you put three quilts in each and then somebody gives you a quilt what do you do where does it go if you fill all your boxes halfway full then one way that your collection storage can grow without taking up any more shelving is by putting one additional quilt over time in each box that's the kind of sort of collections management magic I think when you do all that the deciding on it but try to air with your boxes being emptier how do you recommend sewing object numbers on quilts I think that any way that they're hand sewn is just fine I personally like tieback little pieces of white tieback to write on it's easier to write on than twill tape and you don't have to spend that time turning each edge of your cut twill tape you could just sew those buggers on same place every quilt back bottom corner whatever for consistency down the line if somebody is like is this the top, is this the bottom if you know that your accession number is always in the back bottom left corner that's just the kind of consistency that makes my conservator brain happy you just try to make a logical institutional decision and try to put it somewhere like in a handbook so that everybody does it the same way can net patching be done on a coverlet too it can be done the same way but say a blue and white jack card coverlet it's also successful there you might want to put a solid piece of fabric on the back like a little pink square of blue cotton and then put your net on the front because if you're dealing with a part of your coverlet that's sort of unravely and loose net of course is really loose it doesn't have a body so if you put net on the back when sort of damaged area it might just not have enough body not enough oomph so if you can afford to put something on the back if there's an actual established back then try putting a solid piece on the back and net on the front that'll be a really good sandwich for a coverlet it's certainly net is way less visible on a coverlet than stable texture paperling the next question is how long can you leave a quilt in? forever I don't believe it's I personally don't think that you should go into a properly housed box in a professional collection done by a professional you should be able to just leave it there until 50 years I don't believe that you should go in and change it just for the sake of changing it and not everybody will agree with it sleeves are weight bearing would you use polyester thread for attaching them instead of cotton thread? no we still use the cotton thread and the exception is when we put a Velcro header on a tapestry a tapestry is much heavier then we use a cotton wrap poly a button in craft thread but that is too thick for quilts, quilts don't have cotton tapestry does so I would just stick to that other people might like polyester the reason I avoid polyester especially in a situation where an object is going to hang under its own weight is that polyester does not respond to environmental changes whereas your quilt which is by and large going to be made of natural organic materials it does respond to environmental fluctuations so it's going to get bigger and smaller so having an organic thread in an organic object is generally the rule of thumb would nylon netting be useful on clothing? it's excellent on clothing the conservation netting handout will show you all of the applications it's a fantastic material it's really good can you use, we have two things on proofing we have two things on pool noodles one says can you use pool noodles to roll a quilt on and the other one is can you use pool noodles for covering the dowels before rolling your quilt for storage I've never tested pool noodles to find out whether they are just expanded polyethylene which is what ethyl foam is say for the sake of argument they are 100% expanded polyethylene they are going to be colored but in order to get color in the polyester it's done in such a high temperature industrial way that I think that the risk of that color transferring in some kind of emergency is probably nil so if all of those things were true then I prefer the idea of putting something rigid through the middle of it because a pool noodle is squidgy so when you're holding it you're going to be making your finger dents in that polyester my gut tells me that I would rather do it over a solid dowel middle but I don't like there are more expensive pool noodles that you can buy that are have no dye in them that are white so that's something people would like to consider thank you let's see and Paige Meyers said in our museum we sew numbers on each quilt corner so no matter how it's folded you can find it wow, best case scenario I love it yeah, okay and it looks like our final question is from Clara Lovedell in Connecticut she says we have a large quilt that's hung in my museum since 1976 when it was sewn for the Bicentennial I know I know this is terrible down clean it and give it a rest and it's been sewn to a wooden dowel frame a wooden frame it goes around the whole perimeter of the quilt once it's fully cleaned and rested shouldn't it be hung from something else rather than a horizontal top? I'm sorry but there are too many parameters too many variables for me to be able to answer that question but a consulting conservator would love to come and look at it we could probably teach you how to safely de-install the quilt yourself rather than paying us to be there for the de-installation but all of those other questions there are too many variables for me to answer it verbally yeah I think that's right yeah and then we have a question from Buenos Aires oh hello yeah what are your suggestions about temperature and relative humidity for storage of quilts the best conditions for storage of any organic artifacts are the best that you can provide in a dry environment or an environment like I live in where winter is very very dry in the air but in summer the air is very very wet we just try to use enough air conditioning so that we take some moisture out in the summer and then we try to keep the temperature low enough in the winter and not use the heat too much so that the air does not dry out too much and the first thing to do is to eliminate your extremes and then a very small number of us will have the ability to actually specify every day of the year what the relative humidity and what the temperature are in our storage environment and then I would I would refer you to to publish literature to find out what's perfect for your area but if you have both your temperature and your relative humidity you'll be doing the majority of what you can for your object and then you also have to also have it in the best storage materials so if you can keep your environment stable somewhere in the middle of everything and use the best storage materials and then good practices like always checking for insects and molding to improve the storage of our collection right looks like we maybe have one question coming in I'm not sure but we'll see we'll wait a few minutes I have carefully written down all of the your links that you mentioned during the talk and I will include them I'll expand the handout and include them to that and they'll all be listed there you won't have to go back through the the thing is there an easy way to determine which quilt should be rolled and which should be box and what's the best diameter for tubes I'd say the largest diameter you can afford like six inches is what makes me feel best it doesn't have to be like a ten inch the largest diameter that you can afford is best I would say that thinner quilts are better for rolling quilt tops and thin quilts without a lot of batting and quilts that are thick and plush would do better in a box likewise any quilt with surface embellishment say painted pictures on a crazy quilt or lots of French knots or anything like that would do a lot leaving and just generally maybe a newer or a stronger or healthier quilt I feel would be a better better suited to to take up the rolled storage part of your storage area and that the folded part of your storage area would be reserved for your more delicate quilts and we have two more questions what's the best suggestion for photographing if you don't have big quilts and how would you store a nine by 12 foot carpet on a roll bigger diameter perhaps if it's a pile carpet you'll be able to look up the hints on how to what direction the pile needs to be when you roll a pile carpet and good amount of muslin at the beginning at the end before you start lay out the carpet or the quilt whatever on the last couple inches of fabric and then it sort of grabs the object when you roll it up and then at the end lay down a nice wide piece of muslin or fabric and roll it up so that your fabric goes around the roll of your tube at least once maybe twice if you have extra length of tube put your ties like your strips of fabric your twill tape ties outside is not possible and so then you have some ties on the object sometimes you have both you've got the middle ones on the object and the outer ones around that just the tube OK so I think that's all the questions may have one more flying in but we'll see like I said I will make sure that all of the resources that you mentioned are in the reformatted recording and the way you can tell if the recording has been posted is the ad for it will no longer show in the slider on the home page and then you should just go to the archive page on the website you'll look in the 2017 website page and it'll be there and just so you know that the web addresses for all of the webinars stay the same through the whole their whole lifetime they don't change at all so if you have the ad you can look up the thing so I think that's it we'll see you next month thank you so much Camille this was very good my pleasure and I think that's it great we will see you all next week and that's it okay and don't forget the evaluation this is the evaluation link I am so bad about remembering it the evaluations are really important so the link is up here in the upper left hand corner thank you Mike for reminding me and we will see you next month it's so nice to see so many people from the west from New Mexico and North Dakota and Wyoming I'm really pleased about that and yeah quotes are such a universal language they're wonderful they are yeah okay alright thank you very much thank you