In the eighties

If only I was talking about the weather. Fall has descended here in the Midwest, which means it is 50 degrees and raining. It also means we have almost arrived at our big move date! The collection is now eighty percent packed. EIGHTY!! This is great news. And secretly (or not so secretly, since I'm posting it on a blog) we are actually further ahead than the numbers indicate. You might remember from my previous post that we have a significant number of rolled textiles that will not be boxed and therefore aren't being counted in our tallies. So, our progress is actually closer to 90%. Add in the handful of pieces that we are having custom boxes and/or crates built for by fine arts shippers and my goodness we're just about done! Ofcourse, it is always that last 10% that seems to take the longest, so we're not claiming victory just yet.

Here you can see Tara working with some of the rolled textiles that will actually be boxed. We are sorting them by size to make securing them within a box a little easier.

End of summer days

Left to right: Diana, Aurelia, Tara, Laura, Maggie

As a little thank you for all their hard work this summer, the packing team went out for a treat this week. The weather outside was perfect, so we walked up to the Babcock Dairy store for some ice cream. We followed that with a leisurely stroll through the beautiful Allen Centennial Gardens. Where some of us, namely me, marveled at how much nicer the Allen's vegetable gardens are than our own.


Left to right: Laura, Aurelia, Maggie, Maya, Tara

Unbelievably, summer is just about over and today is our last day with Aurelia. Secretly, we're trying to keep our jealousy in check as she heads off to the French countryside for a year! She will be diligently working the entire time though, as she always does. We're really going to miss her and wish her the best of luck.

Fringed

HLATC 2000.5.1

This embroidered and fringed shawl, HLATC 2000.5.1, has recently been quite a project for the packing team. Densely embroidered with traditional Chinese motifs, the shawl was produced in China for the western European market in the late 19th century. The photos below show you a bit of how exquisitely embroidered the off-white silk shawl is.




And...the project. The silk shawl is fringed on all sides and after bringing the piece out of storage we found that much of that fringe had gotten tangled on itself. What this piece needed was a little TLC and a fringe envelope. Tara, Maggie, Aurelia and Laura each chose a side, sat down at the table and painstakingly untangled the fringe. After untangling, the fringe was then placed into fringe "envelopes" made of archival tissue, to prevent this situation from happening in the future.





The next step of sandwiching the fringe between pieces of blueboard to help fold the piece into a box without disturbing the fringe was unfortunately not captured on camera. Rest assured though, it was a success.

You may notice in these photos that we are not wearing the white cotton gloves you usually see us wearing. Very infrequently we are faced with an incredibly tactile task, such as untangling a very fine fringe, which cannot physically be done with gloves on. In such situations, rather than risk further damage through rough handling, we may work without gloves. If we cannot wear gloves, we are washing our hands with soap and water very frequently to keep as much oil and dirt off of our fingertips as possible. It is definitely a compromise though because your skin is constantly producing oil and no amount of cleaning removes all oils from fingertips.

Teamwork

It seems fitting for my first post to introduce some of the major players in our big packing project. It really takes a lot of teamwork to get something this big accomplished and we've been really lucky to work with some great people.

We owe a huge thank you to Leah and Natalie, who were here with us to kick off the packing project. They worked tirelessly throughout the spring semester, dutifully completing any task assigned to them, even the meticulous vacuuming. And with a smile.

Natalie


Leah

And best of luck to Leah, who graduated this May, as she moves on to bigger and better things!

Our packing team this summer includes two new faces, Aurelia and Laura, who will be working alongside two HLATC veterans, Tara and Maggie. Stop back in to see how our summer progresses!



Aurelia


Laura


Tara


Maggie


Diana