End of Year Cleanup

One of the best gifts I got for Christmas this year was a vase of fake flowers for my desk. You see, I'm not allowed to have fresh flowers in my office. (Actually, I always feel sort of strange saying that I'm "not allowed" as if it is cruelly banned by some order on high. Us collections folks put that rule on ourselves.  We are obsessed with keeping bugs out of the collection, and so we self-impose a no food and no fresh flowers policy in our office space.) So my parents bought me a lovely vase of fake flowers.

One requirement of the gift was that I clean off my work desk to make room for them. I have a problem of allowing mountains of papers to pile up on my desk, and since last year I was sick on New Year's Eve for my usual year-end desk clean-off day, I had TWO YEARS worth of desk piles to go through this year.

But I got through it and oh man did it feel good. I love the last two weeks of the year. It is a quiet time to just wrap up a lot of loose ends and get stuff done. Besides cleaning off my desk I...

Put away about 40 hats that had been inventoried but not yet put in boxes

Finished processing all the 2015 clothing and textile accessions

Best moment for that was when I was going through some items from the 1990 Goodwill games and was using my friend EB (who was a Russian major) to help translate the text on a shirt that had been purchased from a vendor at the games. Here is paraphrased version of our text conversation:

Me: Can I get some help with some Russian translation?
EB: Yes!
Me: [Sends photo of patches on shoulders]
Me: It is a sailor-style shirt that looks very official. So maybe the word is "Navy" or "Security"?
EB: Umm....I think it says "Fish Farm"

(We eventually figured out that it was an abbreviation for the Ministry of Fisheries)

Finished a super exciting data cleanup project that a volunteer and I have been chipping away at for over a year

Wrapped up some loose ends from the shoe project

There were some random socks and spats that had been found on the shelves which needed to be moved to different places, and there were two pairs of thigh-high boots which I hadn't figured out what to do with yet.

The shafts of the boots (yes, that is what it is called) were very fabric-y so rather than stuff them like tall leather boots, I stuffed the feet and then rolled the tops of the boots into neat little bundles.

Found some interesting stuff on my messy desk

On a page of random notes from something I attended in 2015 I found the following message:

"A necessary first step to grandeur is a delusion of grandeur"

I've decided to make that my motto for 2016.

Hat Inventory: Second Verse, Same As The First

A few weeks ago I posted about the completion of the shoe inventory and the emotional roller coaster it put me through. Well now that is officially DONE and so it's on to the hats!

But basically, the hat inventory is the same agony and ecstasy of the shoes. There is lots of: "Oh wow, I just touched it and all the feathers started falling off, well hopefully it won't have a local label...aw crap...MacDougall-Southwick, Seattle" and "Geez Frederick & Nelson seemed to make a lot of hats with black netting." But there are some additional complicating factors that the shoes didn't have.

Two years ago, the hats were the focus of a frantic moth-related bag-and-contain project. Since then, they have basically just been chillin' in their archival plastic prisons, waiting to be checked for bugs and stored more appropriately. So while it is exciting to finally begin working on them, it means lots of additional steps above and beyond the basic inventory procedure.

Regular inventory is instant gratification--you pull a box off the shelf, discover a bunch of cool stuff you've never seen before, put the box back, and start on the next shelf. But now it's like-- oh hey, before you put those back on the shelf and move on to the next exciting discoveries, you need to check them for bug evidence, decide which ones to freeze, pack the ones for freezing, do some vacuuming, build boxes or pack them in existing boxes, make labels...

Plus I'm moving a bunch of hats off shelves that should be for shoes, and discovering boxes of hats in odd places, and since the official hat shelves are already packed full I'm not sure where everything is going to go...

Big projects always start like this though-- at the beginning you haven't figured out a system and you also haven't done enough to see any satisfying results. Right now it just feels like I am making an even bigger mess. But I have faith that we'll figure out a system and soon I'll be encouraged by the sight of happy hats in boxes on completed shelves.

Dance In The Textile Room Like No One's Watching

Bonus feature: I was previously convinced that I had identified the ugliest hat in the collection. I've already found several which may be strong contenders for the title. Stay tuned.

Insect Stoicism

Do I talk about bugs too much on this blog? I really want to do a post about bugs this week, but for some reason I feel like it is overdone. Well I'm going to go ahead anyway.

DEAL WITH IT

It struck me this week that you have to have a very specific reaction to bugs in order to be a museum collections person. First of all, you can't have compassion for them. If you are the kind of person who likes to trap spiders and carefully escort them outside, collections work is going to be tough. In grad school, during a lecture about deep-freezing a carpet beetle infested textile, someone piped up and asked if there wasn't some more humane way that didn't involve killing the bugs.

Look, I'm not some big advocate of DDT who wants to see all insects eradicated from earth. 'Cause, you know, ecosystems and circle of life and such. But when bugs are feeding on a wool textile, there just isn't a way to, like, ask nicely if they would leave.

But on the other hand, you can't be squeamish about bugs. If you HATE all things that creep and crawl  and are more like to to scream and run when encountering insects, collections work is probably not the gig for you.

This week Betsy and I tried to get our Integrated Pest Management plan in order (IPM for short). IPM is a big part of many collections jobs. What you are supposed to do is strategically place sticky traps around your space (aka "blunder" traps which don't lure with food or pheromones, but just try to catch whoever is walking past), change them periodically, identify all the bugs you catch, and keep the data of what you are finding. No matter how clean and sealed your collections space is there WILL be bugs. If you monitor though, you know if you are getting any bad bugs, and can keep track of what kinds of things you get seasonally.

In other words, you have to be totally ok with spending some serious quality time with dead bugs.

And in MOHAI's case it also means you get to spend some quality time with what may be the single oldest laptop continually in use in the city of Seattle.

Now upgraded to Windows 2000!

We use it because it runs an old CD-ROM program that connects to a microscope. You can see the image on the screen, take snapshots, and download them to a USB. The laptop is a little wheezy but it works fine and the program is actually pretty cool.

It turns out that in order to be a great collections manager, your approach to bugs has to be that of a fourth grader. You have to be inquisitive, slightly sadistic, and thrilled by the gross-out factor. Seeing little specks get blown up into six-legged creatures on screen tapped into the "Whoa! Cool!" science side of me. I mean, just check out these pics:

WHOA! GROSS!

I really like this pic of two spiders hanging out with a millipede

This is maybe a beetle locked in the death snare of a spider

Let's look closer:

FROZEN IN STRUGGLE FOR ALL ETERNITY

I have to admit though, it was hard not to get just a little creeped out sometimes by all these multi-legged beasts appearing so big on a computer screen. The best part was when Betsy and I were quietly considering a section of the trap when one of the bugs STARTED MOVING. 

We screamed and jumped back. I guess not everything was fully dead, and the heat from the microscope light sort of woke it up. Kristin was back in her corner laughing at us, and then came over to look too. We found the spot and then all had a super girly EWWWWWWWW GROSS moment before stoically resuming our work. 

Dear Lord, Let It Be Millipedes

Last Friday, at 4:30 in the afternoon, I was doing my last diaper check before the weekend and noticed a little spot on the white wall. A bug. Then I saw another one. And another. They looked like living versions of the desiccated carcasses we've been pulling out of the costumes from the old storage location. Carpet beetles. I went cold with panic.

[A GIF has not yet been created for this emotion]

I summoned the collections manager to come see. Once we knew what we were looking for we found them everywhere. 

FYI this is the LEAST gross bug picture in this post. You have been warned.

Betsy grabbed as many as she could in a sticky trap and went to work trying to get a good microscope shot and identify them. I went to work with a Kleenex, killing as many as I could find. (If this is upsetting to you, you should probably stop reading now. I find my job has made me pretty compassionless toward the sanctity of bug life).

The first microscope pictures looked like this:

If you google "carpet beetle larva" you will see it didn't look good. 

All last weekend I was sick with worry about this situation. Carpet beetles would be disaster. I couldn't even blog about it-- it was too raw, to painful to joke about yet. On Monday we started getting responses back from the museum pest management listserv and some entomologists we know. A few agreed that it was probably a carpet beetle. But a few others brought up a new possibility…millipedes.

Apparently at this young stage, carpet beetles and millipedes look awfully similar. But millipedes are not a museum pest. Sometimes when it rains a lot they can flee inside (perhaps through a leak in the wall??) but they aren't interested in fabric. Once in a collections storage space they will either die off or leave of their own initiative. 

On Tuesday we decided to take another round of microscope photos. I went and chased down a few of the biggest ones I could find, trying to get them as intact as possible onto the trap. The new round of pictures looked like this: 

Millipedes at a similar stage look like this:

From BugGuide.net

The entomologists also suggested taking a leg count. Any more than six and it can't be a beetle. One was flipped over on the trap, and we are pretty sure that that is a whole bunch of little legs sticking up. 

So why am I telling you this in so much detail and including all these gross pictures that are probably making your skin crawl a little?

Because I am trying to make sense of the fact that my life has taken a turn in which I am genuinely excited about a millipede infestation. Seriously. On Tuesday all I wanted to talk about was millipedes and how I was in a good mood because of millipedes and how it was so exciting that it was millipedes.

MILLIPEDE DANCE PARTY AWWWW YEAAHHH

SYTTD Wichita Edition

Last weekend I was in Kansas helping my cousin Laura find a wedding dress. Laura and I are close in age, both only children, and visited each other a lot growing up--so she is the nearest thing I have to a sister. When I called to congratulate her on the engagement I blurted out, "When are you going shopping for your wedding dress and can I come?" Knowing that I can be kind of an exhausting and intense person, I was pleasantly surprised when she replied, "That would be so helpful! Would you?"

Awesome. All this Say Yes to the Dress watching was finally going to pay off!

We went to four bridal salons, three of which were great, one of which was a total bust. The latter seemed promising because their website advertised dresses in our price range and what seemed like a pretty big selection. But actually the selection was small, most dresses were surprisingly expensive, and an overall feeling of grimness seemed to pervade the shop. In retrospect, my first clue should have been the fact that one of the photos on the website was literally a picture of a teenager texting while wearing a hideously garish prom gown.

This photo sums up our enthusiasm for the store

At the last shop I got really excited because they had a PNINA TORNAI KNOCK-OFF GOWN COMPLETE WITH SLUTTY MESH BODICE.

My cousin, who for some strange reason wanted to keep her midsection covered while getting married in a church in front of her family and friends, did not try it on. I texted Olivia the photo and she asked, "Well why didn't you try it on?"

And at that moment I realized that not doing so would be among my life's greatest regrets.

My other greatest regret from the trip was that David's Bridal didn't try to hard sell us one of their "gown preservation kits," (which we saw them attempting to push on other people). My take down of that B.S. would have been EPIC. Here is how I imagined it:

1) No actual conservator would "preserve" a dress by pumping it with chemicals and then cramming it into a little box.

2) I have actually had the experience of opening a wedding dress that had been "preserved" in a box in the 1950s and it was horribly wrinkled, and reeked of chemicals so strongly that we couldn't be in the same room with it. Also, newsflash, the company that had guaranteed it for 50 years was long out of business. So good luck with that.

3) Skip the bug treatment. No bug wants your 100% polyester wedding dress.

4) In your advertisement you mention "museum quality" muslin. Hmm interesting. There is another name for that. It is called REGULAR MUSLIN.

Fewer Moths, More Shoes

When that moth in the textile room was first spotted, I felt like this:

But, since operation bag and trap was completed there have been no new sightings. So that is good. But there are so many decisions to be made about how to deal with things and what kinds of precautions to take, that basically when people say the word "Moth" my reaction is now this:

Just leave me here on the floor and perhaps the moths will choose me to consume instead of the clothing.  It will be my greatest calling

But no, I have lots of exciting things to live for these days. Specifically: SHOES.

I realized I never posted pictures of the shoes I bought from Hourglass Footwear. I had a really hard time picking which of their dozens of styles to go with, but in the end I made some really good choices. First off, I got some gorgeous heels which are remarkably comfortable.

All the top fashion photographers use carpet as a backdrop

And then some flats. I really liked the pattern called Burlesque and also the green version  Wicked Ways. Since each pair is custom painted once you order, I asked if the pattern could be done in pink. No problem!

Boom! Manifested.

The latest shoe-based news is that Hourglass is going to donate a pair to the MOHAI collection! After the trying task of deciding which shoes to pick for my own feet I couldn't handle deciding what design to save for posterity in the permanent collection. So we decided to run a contest and let the public choose! Hourglass picked the six finalists (they are the best sellers from each of their artists) and you can vote here.

The winner will be announced at FASHION THEMED FIRST THURSDAY coming your way SEPTEMBER 5TH. Hourglass will be there, along with Prairie Underground and a representative from the Nordstrom Archives. I'm also putting together a small case of accessories from the collection and doing an audio tour about fashion on display. The full info is here. I have high expectations of it being an awesome day. I'm definitely wearing one of the above pairs of shoes.

Moth Panic: Not Just an Awesome Name for a Band

Just as everything was going great and calming down at work, the worst happened. THE WORST. We found a moth in the textile room. After all of our efforts to freeze and clean things and keep that room bug-free AAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGGG NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Dramatic re-enactment of the scene that ensued

The moth was found near the hats, so we spent the next two days enlisting every spare pair of hands to hastily wrap up all the hats in plastic. Hopefully that will contain whatever is infested and protect the rest in case something is still crawling around looking for a home. We also put out moth pheromone traps and each day I check them anxiously. I can't decide though-- do I want to find a moth in the trap? If I do, it means the bastard is dead...but there are still loose moths flying around. If the trap is empty maybe the wrapping project successfully sealed up all the others...or maybe we just aren't catching them.

F you and your mind games

But basically now everything seems chaotic again. When I heard about the moth, I dropped what I was doing and didn't return until the hats were all packed up. I had been sewing artifact numbers on the Barclay Girls outfits and had literally left a needle part way through one of the pieces. Losing those days to hat packing set me back on projects I had been nearly caught up on, and now there is this added monster project of dealing with the hats.

Despite going into a moth-induced depression for about four days, I bounced back and tried to revel in all the things that still make my job awesome. On Wednesday I visited the workspace of Prairie Underground, a local clothing company that designs and makes everything in Seattle. I had been communicating with them about possibly donating some items to MOHAI, and so this week I made the trip to tour their space and see what they were willing to offer. I met with one of the founders of the company and was totally blown away by what she showed me. She went through a rack of about 15 things, telling a story about each of them and explaining why that style was important to the evolution of the brand. I had planned to take 1-3 items, so I knew I was in trouble when the first three all sounded like must-haves and there were twelve to go. I ended up narrowing it down to six. For five of them there were very clear reasons for why that piece was essential, but for the sixth I allowed myself to be drawn by aesthetics and what I thought would really be eye-catching on a mannequin. That sixth piece? A beautiful and comfortable bestselling style they call the "Mothette."

What does it mean?? Was I starting to sympathize with my hungry enemies? Or was my subconscious fantasizing about wearing this while slaying my mothy foes? GET OUT OF MY BRAIN YOU FABRIC-EATING MONSTERS!!!

Or maybe it is just a really kickass dress. 

Operation Deep Freeze

Early on in the process of moving textiles out of our old warehouse we found this scarf in a bright, neon color of pink. I mean this thing was like eye-searing pink. It actually kind of hurt to look at it. It said it had been worn for "Operation Deep Freeze" which apparently is the code name for U.S. missions/operations in Antarctica. In other words: dudes in Antarctica were issued clothing so pink that it just might save their lives if they got lost. One can only assume that their official motto is "Safer Living Through Fabulousness."

"Come find me in the snooooooowwwww!"

Soon after that discovery, "Operation Deep Freeze" became a fitting name for a mission I embarked on myself. While we were packing things at the old warehouse we started discovering various kinds of bug evidence. Just this week I sent these pictures to a couple of my coworkers. The response came back "Maybe you should change your blog title to 'Ways I grossed out my colleagues today'."

This is what the floor looked like when we moved some hanging garments. 

Lots of spider bits and what looks like moth cocoons

A horror on par with Snakes on a Plane: Bugs on a Collar

(luckily these were dead)

This is bad news for a textile collection. So we decided to send batches of stuff to get frozen. Just as vacuuming is a minimally invasive way to clean, freezing is the preferred pest-stoppage method over harmful chemicals. Fortunately, we have a friendly relationship with a cold storage facility so we are able to freeze entire rolling racks and pieces of furniture at once. 

Now that the first big batch is back from the freezer, the next step is to check and vacuum everything before putting it away. It is taking a long time, but if we skip this step, we might find a dead bug or a moth hole in the future and have no way of knowing if it was leftover from the old warehouse or is something new. So we are going through each item, vacuuming out any dust or bug carcasses, and making notes of any existing holes.

The fun part is that sometimes we discover other weird or exciting stuff in the garments. Last week we found documents and photographs in the pocket of a coat that belonged to a politician. This week we cleaned a hunting jacket that had feathers all over the inside one of the interior pockets (it was not a down coat). Is that a thing? When you hunt birds do you just jam the dead ones into your pocket?

One thing that I love about my job is the variety of tasks. When people ask what I did today I can say things like, "Well, I answered emails and then spent some time plucking feathers out of a hunting coat."

Advanced Vacuuming

This week I vacuumed one of MOHAI's most significant, and most fragile artifacts: The Petticoat Flag.

No, the image isn't flipped. I'll get to that in a sec.

The story of the petticoat flag is that it was made during the "Battle of Seattle" in 1856 -- a conflict between U.S. troops and Native people. During the fighting, settlers fled to a nearby blockhouse for shelter. A group of women decided to spend the time sewing this flag, using strips of red wool and white linen from their petticoats. The blue may have been a petticoat or a blanket, and the hang loops on the top are made of printed cotton. (About the orientation: It doesn't look nice on both sides so we can't just flip it over. It was originally meant to hang vertically which would have put the stars in the upper left corner).

Textiles weren't cheap or easy to come by in those days--certainly not for women in a small pioneer town. Add to that the fact that they were probably giving up clothes off their bodies for this task, and I find the story very touching. 

Stirring historical context aside, this thing is super old and in not great condition. The linen has yellowed, the blue fabric is thin and shredding to bits, and the red wool has survived multiple assaults by hungry bugs. That picture above is old, and just looking at it makes me shudder. Since then it underwent serious conservation work and that sucker is now stitched down flat on a padded board. None of this casual, wrinkled "I unfurled this with a swish of my wrists" look. That isn't even the scariest picture we have of it: 

Horrifying. I can hear the fibers weakening from here. 

Now we avoid touching it or moving it whenever possible. Instead of taking it out of its display at the old museum and packing it, the entire display was rolled onto the moving truck. Once inside the new museum, the old case was opened and the flag was carefully whisked into its new home. The new case is tightly sealed and has this special glass that is opaque until you trip a sensor and then a dim light makes the flag fleetingly visible. 

As I was gazing at it in its new home, I started noticing all this dusty crap on it. At first I panicked because I thought it was frass (aka bug poop), the telltale sign of insect activity. But I had checked it very carefully before it left the old place. How could it have exploded in bugs during one moving-van ride? My next theory was that it was dust from the old plexiglass cover that slid onto the flag as the cover was removed. That made more sense considering some of the "stuff" appeared to be glitter, and we all know that no bug is magical enough to poop glitter. 

Problem was, the only artifact vacuum we had on site didn't have the knob where you could control the amount of suction. And seriously, if any artifact in the collection needed to be vacuumed on low, it was this one. So basically "vacuum the petticoat flag" was on my to-do list for about two months before I finally found an opportunity to have someone schlep the variable speed vacuum to and from the new museum for me. But this week I did it and it was actually a little less terrifying than I expected. I also gave the white edge of the padded board a good clean, so if it does turn out to be bug activity, the frass will be visible immediately. 

Although if that happens, you'll probably see me fleeing to the nearest blockhouse.

This Week In Anxiety Dreams

So I had another work-related anxiety dream this week. I was doing a last minute check of this kimono that is going on exhibit and I saw something that looked like bug evidence...and then another thing that could be bug evidence...and then something that was definitely a dead bug...then something larva shaped that moved when I poked it...then an adult bug that was definitely moving...and O GOD THIS WHOLE THING IS CRAWLING WITH BUGS.

First off, I'd like to pause for a moment and bask in what a ridiculous museum-specific nightmare that is. Only someone who has weekly discussions about integrated pest management has crap like that show up in her subconscious.

But second, for all my talk about how stressful things are at the museum right now, I don't really feel riddled with anxiety on a constant basis. Not every day is stressful, and I'm pretty good at unwinding in the evening. My roommate and I spend most nights enjoying the trashiest, most mindless shows that Hulu and Netflix have to offer. When I woke up from the bug dream I was sort of like, "Really, brain? I give you RuPaul's Drag Race and Say Yes to the Dress to work with, and you create a pest-based nightmare instead of some mash-up where drag queens go shopping for wedding dresses?!"

Calm down and put it in a bag

This week, as I expectantly searched through a photo album for insect carcasses, it occurred to me that you couldn't really be a good museum collections person if you had a crippling fear of bugs.

Artifact collections shouldn't have bugs or vermin of any kind, but part of the process of keeping that way requires an obsessive interest in bugs and evidence of bugs. We put down sticky traps, check exhibit cases for frass (bug poop), and if we actually find a bug our first instinct is to put it in a bag. I once looked down to see a small bug crawling on my hand, and my response was to walk calmly over to the collections manager's desk, show her, and ask for an insect bag. Once bagged, we looked through her chart of harmful artifact-eating insects and tried to identify it.

Bugs are also a big reason I've been doing so much vacuuming. As a precaution, we've decided every textile-based object coming off exhibit will get vacuumed, deep frozen, and vacuumed again. The freezing kills insects, and the vacuuming removes dead bugs, eggs, and dust that might be tasty to insects in the future. I haven't found any bug evidence on objects for a while, and so sometimes I wonder if all this extra vacuuming is really necessary. But last week I found some bug bits on a fabric-covered photo album, and it was actually sort of exciting and validating. With relish I paged through the album looking for carcasses, and with each one I removed, I felt like I was creating order in a chaotic world. I may not be able to fix global poverty, but I can fix this.