Quagmire Surprise

One of the tough things about collections work is that you can have a great plan for what you want to get done that day, and then just unexpectedly wander into a giant project that takes multiple days to resolve.

This week I was looking for interesting deaccessioned artifacts for a hands-on activity I'm doing at the museum. I wanted to show some examples of different kinds of damage (fading, bug holes, silk shattering) and I remembered seeing some boxes in storage labeled "examples of deterioration." I found them and brought them into the conservation lab to take a look. Sure enough, the boxes contained a bunch of super sad, damaged, crumbling-to-bits objects.

As I began looking at them I started to see accession numbers and I got nervous. These items were deaccessioned right? I mean everything is jammed together and there are like three dresses just wadded up in the bottom of this box. These aren't STILL ARTIFACTS ARE THEY?!?!?!

Oh yeah. They were artifacts.

I was reeeeeelly close to just closing the boxes back up, putting them back on the shelf, and pretending like I didn't see anything.

But no. I was in this mess and the only thing to do was to take the time to properly sort it out. I got out new, bigger boxes that would fit the items more comfortably. I re-packed everything and wrapped the boxes for freezing (since some of the "condition issues" were bug damage I wanted to be safe). Once they are out of the freezer I'll go through them more carefully, officially proposing some for deaccession and do my best to stabilize/clean/take care of anything we really should be keeping.

Once I went through everything, I actually discovered that the two items that were in the worst condition had already been deaccessioned.

...but one of them had a Seattle label.

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.

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."