By Jennifer Nason and Camille Myers Breeze In last week’s blog, the Oberlin Connection, Camille wrote about a donation of clothing from Mike & Midge Burnham. While cataloging Ruth Thayer Burnham’s exquisitely preserved 1895 silk wedding dress, we came across something fascinating: alterations to the stays stitched within the bodice of the dress. Assuming one only wears one's wedding dress once, we have been curious about why this dress might have been meddled with. Hand-stitched inside the bodice of the dress are sixteen stays. Stays, or boning, are thin strips of rigid material used to help hold the form of a corset or dress. The earliest materials used for stays were wood, ivory, baleen--also called whalebone--, and bone, hence the term boning. By the mid 19th century, steel and baleen predominated. The elongated torso popular in the 1880s to early 1890s required large amounts of corsetry but by the late 1990s a lighter, shorter style emerged. This simpler shape required much less boning than in the 1880s and permitted a greater range of movement. Ruth Thayer’s 1895 marriage to Alfred Burnham took place right while this change was taking place. The stays in Ruth's wedding dress were sewn in by hand and also altered to make some shorter than others. The cuts to the fabric casing of the shortened stays reveal them to be both a translucent and opaque flexible material. This is likely baleen, which comes in a range of colors that sources suggest can be used to identify the whale species from which it came. But the stays tell an even more complicated story. The front four are more flexible and lack the crisscross pattern of stitching that holds the others down. Luckily, two are coming loose from the dress allowing us to see blue lettering on the back that reads, “Warren’s Featherbone.” Featherbone was the unique invention of dry-goods salesman Edward Warren. On a tour of a feather duster factory, Warren realized that the inexpensive pointer feathers being discarded could replace whale boning. Warren opened a store in 1873 to sell his new Featherbone and the compressed-feather boning quickly became popular for its light-weight, rust-proof quality. Warren’s Featherbone enjoyed its peak of success between 1873 and 1900. How can we explain the complex series of decisions that went into the construction and alteration of this dress? Perhaps Ruth originally wore it with a separate corset and the boning was altered for subsequent wearings. If the dress was worn only once, though, perhaps the longer stays were trimmed in the final fitting to make the bride comfortable, and Featherbone was preferred for the front of the bodice. ![]() As an opera singer, Ruth would no doubt have sung on her wedding day, requiring an extra degree of mobility and comfort. She also had many occasions on which to wear spectacular costume, such as the gown pictured in this photograph, which appears to be Edwardian, from the first decade of the 20th century. As cataloging and rehousing continue, we will search for other alterations in the wedding dress that could confirm that it was worn more than once. We may never know for certain, but perhaps our readers have additional insight into the story told by this particular detail of Ruth's spectacular wedding ensemble. Please weigh in if you wish to hazard a guess.
4 Comments
By Camille Myers Breeze This beginning of this story may sound familiar to some of you. From a young age, I started absconding with cool things my parents had in their houses, in my case the textiles. When they both downsized after I went off to College, they passed on to me everything I could find space for. By the time I was 35 and Museum Textile Services had moved to its own home, I had a bona fide study collection filling several archival boxes. Since then, family members have sent me everything from wedding gowns to souvenirs and, more recently, we have begun accepting the occasional donation. I should stop here and make something perfectly clear. We are not a museum. We're not even a non-profit. Museum Textile Services is an independent conservation laboratory with a growing client base and a popular internship-training program. When someone contacts us about making a donation, we make it clear that we can't appraise their items or provide a tax receipt. Nevertheless, donors tell us, they are grateful to have found a place where their clothing and textiles will be cared for and put to good use. Mike and Midge Burnham were referred to me late in 2012 by my friend Dana, who runs a vintage shop in Newmarket, NH, called Concetta's Closet. Dana had purchased much of their family's 20th-century clothing but knew that the older items were museum quality and not suitable for wearing. Was I interested, the Burnhams asked, in a donation of several boxes of 19th- and early 20th-century clothing? The size of the donation concerned me at first but what eventually convinced that it was destined for MTS was the Oberlin connection. Some of the oldest donated items belonged to Mike's great-grandmother Cassandra Vernon Washburn Burnham. Cassandra (1849-1935) was a graduate of Mount Holyoke Seminary. She outlived her husband, the Rev. Michael Burnham (1839-1905), by 30 years, and during her widowhood she became innkeeper at Grey Gables in my college town of Oberlin, OH. Exactly how long Cassandra ran Grey Gables in not clear but in 1930 the college acquired it for student housing. In 1952, Grey Gables became just the second of Oberlin’s still-vibrant student co-ops but it was demolished in the 1960s during a wave of large-dormitory construction.The land on which Grey Gables stood became the Grey Gables parking lot. ![]() Cassandra and Michael Burnham had five children, of whom two survived to adulthood. The couple is buried in Spring Street Cemetery in Essex, MA. Their son, the Rev. Edmund Alden Burnham married the highly successful contralto Ruth Thayer in 1895. Ruth Thayer Burnham's spectacular wedding ensemble, along with other outfits of hers, were also donated to the MTS study collection and will be the subject of future MTS blogs. Museum Textile Services does not actively seek items for the study collection--we don't have the space or staff, for starters. But the stories these objects tell, and the opportunity for learning that they present, are priceless. For more stories from the MTS study collection, select "study collection" from the search bar on the right-hand side of this page.
By Camille Myers Breeze In this third and final installment of our AWVS blog series, we hope to show how important even a simple textile conservation treatment is for long-term preservation of historic uniforms. The Wheaton College AWVS collection consists of 20 uniform pieces and accessories, plus spare buttons and badges, a ribbon, a hat band, and some notes on paper. One of the notes reads "Ginnie Scripps Pace's hat--uniform sold to Barbara Owen." To date the identity of the two women is unknown. The uniforms and accessories appear to span a wide date range, based on their materials, which you can read more about in our last blog. The hats, caps, pocketbooks, ties, and belt were conserved by micro-vacuuming and humidification. They were then finger pressed back to shape. Even a cool iron was avoided because the complexity of the constructions and evidence of prior scorching from an iron. For the time being, the accessories are padded with unbuffered acid-free tissue to hold their shape. Ethafoam and Volara forms are recommended for display and long-term storage. The dress, jackets, and skirts all benefited from conservation wetcleaning to remove deterioration products, rehydrate the fibers, and realign the creases and folds. Each was first tested for washfastness, since a variety of cotton and rayon fabrics are represented in the group. The jackets and two of the skirts appear to be made of the same heavy rayon plain-weave that gives off a reddish color in warm water. The decision was made to wetclean these in cool deionized water with a single application of a .3% solution of Orvus WA Paste in water. The remainder of the garments were wetcleaned the same way but with warmer water to facilitate in the cleaning and dispersion of the Orvus surfactant. Each garment was rinsed thoroughly until the water was free of suds or discoloration and then lightly toweled to remove excess water. The uniforms were padded with nylon net and hung to dry. Once dry, the decision was made to lightly iron each garment inside out to remove any remaining creasing. We were discourage from ironing on the outside of thick areas like cuffs and collars by evidence of the same scorching from repeated pressing seen on the garrison caps. The conservation of the AWVS collection from Wheaton College was distinguished more by what it was not than by what it was. It was not a complex treatment requiring hours of tedious stitching to highly damaged fabric. Instead it was an exercise in modesty that met the needs of the collection and made it available for safe study and display. Above all, the AWVS collection provided an opportunity for learning about history through the intimate media of clothing and textiles.
Click here for Part I and Part II of this blog. by Tegan Kehoe and Camille Myers Breeze In last week's post, Jen Nason introduced you to the American Women’s Voluntary Services and the collection of WWII uniforms and accessories we are conserving for Wheaton College. Today we will take a closer look at the garments themselves, and what we they tell us about fashion and rationing during WWII. 1940’s women’s fashions for daily wear were heavily influenced by the war, even outside of the armed forces and support organizations. Women favored tailored blouses, jackets, and knee-length skirts. They were practical, sturdy, and used relatively little fabric, but had feminine details such as shoulder pads and higher hemlines than 1930’s styles. These fashions were sometimes called utility fashion, named after the Utility Clothing Scheme, one of the rationing schemes used in the UK. An exhibit on this topic, entitled “Beauty as Duty,” came to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2011. An indication not only of the war-time economy but also of the long duration of the conflict is the variety of fabrics found in the Wheaton AWVS collection. Among the collection, we find two pocketbooks, two ties, one belt, five garrison caps, two hats, three skirts, three jackets, and one dress. There are no fewer than 5 different fabrics represented, from 100% cotton plain weave to different styles or types of rayon. The light-blue cotton skirt, belt, and hat could perhaps be the earliest in the collection. Sgt. Burgess Scott's 1945 article Clothing and the War states that cotton was extremely difficult to come by and rayon was the most common substitute. A manufactured cellulosic fiber, rayon is neither a synthetic nor truly a natural fiber. It can mimic the characteristics of silk, linen, and cotton but rayon has poor elastic regain and was best dry cleaned. Another interesting feature of this collection is that two of the three jackets have wooden buttons that are painted a gold color to look like metal. During WWII, metal was in short supply, so it was considered patriotic to use substitutes whenever possible and donate metal to scrap drives to be recycled for military purposes. The Wheaton College collection has extra sets of buttons, apparently salvaged from other garments. Wheaton's AWVS collection is in very good condition and had probably been dry cleaned before going into storage decades ago. Stay tuned for our final AWVS blog, a show-and-tell of the uniforms before and after conservation.
by Jennifer Nason This month Museum Textile Services is lucky enough to work with a prized piece of American history. We are conserving a large group of WWII women's uniforms and accessories for the permanent collection at Wheaton College. The American Women’s Voluntary Services, or AWVS, was founded in January 1940. Its founders were intelligent and wealthy international socialites that based the AWVS on an English counterpart of the Women’s Voluntary Services. The founders believed that the United States would surely enter the ever growing war, and thus they formed the American Women’s Voluntary Services as a way to prepare the country for the war. The formation of the group was believed to be premature, as the AWVS was originally thought of as suspicious and an alarmist group. Nonetheless, when Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941 the AWVS already had about 18,000 members. During the war years the number of AWVS members increased dramatically to 325,000. The members provided a variety of services and support; they sold war bonds, and delivered messages, they drove ambulances, trucks, cycle corps and dog-sleds, they also worked in navigation, aerial photography, aircraft spotting, and fire safety. When the War ended in 1945, the American Women’s Voluntary Services was disbanded. It had accomplished its goal as a service and support provider throughout the war. Most of the members were normal women that spent large amounts of their time away from their homes and loved ones. However, some of these women had famous names, such as Hattie McDaniel, Joan Crawford, and Betty White. Regardless of who these women were, their part in the American Women’s Voluntary Services changed the face of the American home front. Stay tuned for another blog about our conservation treatment of Wheaton College's AWVS collection.
by Camille Myers Breeze In celebration of Valentines Day, we're sharing one of the most romantic projects ever to come to Museum Textile Services. Early in 2011, we received a call from a young woman who had a family wedding veil in need of conservation. She and her sister were both getting married and both wished carry on the family tradition of wearing the veil. ![]() Photograph by David Loehwing. Marjorie Affel, pictured throughout this blog, and her sister Sarah, are the fourth generation of their family to wear the veil. It had last been conserved in the 1980s on the occasion of their mother, Ellen Flagg Affel's wedding. At that time, the entire veil had been backed with a single piece of fine nylon bobbinet to provide overall support. Areas of weakness were hand stitched to the bobbinet with fine cotton thread. A modern headband was fastened to the top of the veil. The veil may also have been wetcleaned in the 1980s. After Ellen's wedding, the family veil was carefully packed in an acid-free cardboard box for storage. Museum Textile Services received the veil and I assessed its condition. It did not need cleaning beyond careful vacuuming with a high-efficiency filtered micro vacuum. Several previous repairs were found to still be sound, but a few were now loose. In addition, some of the applied ribbon that forms part of the veil's decoration were lifting because the stitches holding them had broken. The veil was heavily creased from being folded in its storage box. Conservation was completed in the summer of 2011 and the veil was returned gently draped in a cotton garment bag. In 2012, after the weddings were over, the veil returned to MTS. It was again assessed and found to be clean and stable. After careful vacuuming, the veil was packed in a new, archival corrugated poly- propylene storage box. The new box should last longer than the previous one because it will not re-acidify, as the old acid-free box has. In the photo below, all but the youngest woman has worn the family veil in her wedding. Museum Textile Services is honored to play a role in preserving this wonderful family tradition.
by Courtney Jason When this WWI Army jacket came to Museum Textile Services, we did not know too much about it. According to the client, it had belonged to their grandfather, who was an Irish immigrant who enlisted to escape the orphanage he was living in. Beyond that, the rest was unclear. In the intervening weeks, much has come to light about Alexander G. McLean, his uniform, and his service in the Great War for Civilization. ![]() McLean's WWI jacket before conservation. McLean's army jacket is a 1917 pattern jacket, which is distin- guishable from the earlier 1912 pattern by a single line of stitching around the sleeve cuffs. Details like this can be found on the US Army's website in an extensive PDF by David Cole. Recently the client returned with more items belonging to their grandfather. The buttons, pins, business cards, and books have inspired us to begin our research anew, and while we still do not know a lot about the life of Alexander McLean, we are developing a more complete picture. We know he joined the Army with the Yankee Division, and that he likely spent the majority of his time abroad fighting in France. The first step of the project is to mount the jacket for display. It has been carefully vacuumed and an archival support pillow has been constructed. Next it will be mount it to a fabric-covered solid-support panel and covered with a UV filtering acrylic shadow box. When the jacket is complete, additional shadow boxes will be constructed for the other items. While there are still a lot of unanswered questions, we are looking forward to learning more about the life of Alexander McLean. Be sure to check our Facebook page for updates as we continue to work on this project.
By Camille Myers Breeze The latest in our series of MTS Handouts is called Displaying Textiles, and is designed to help you choose the best locations and methods for displaying your textiles. By the time you see visible changes, such as color fading, yellowing, tears, or insect activity, your textile has already been irreversibly damaged. Continuing to display a textile under poor display conditions will accelerate deterioration and shorten the textile’s useful and/or decorative lifespan. Having a textile conservator stabilize the textile can allow it to be displayed again, but only if sensible precautions are taken. Displaying a textile in a frame with no glazing, or with non-filtering glazing, is harmful to the textile. Anything framed prior to the 1980s will have plain glass or acrylic with no ultraviolet-filtering capacities. All framed textiles should be retrofitted with UV-filtering glazing or stored safely. Even with UV-filtered glazing, a framed textile can be harmed by light, particularly sunlight, which heats up the fibers causing harmful expansion and contraction. Tapestries, quilts, and other large, flat textiles, can be safely displayed on a wall without a display case if the conditions in the room are suitable. Once a safe location has been determined to hang your flat textile, a conservator can provide a Velcro hanging system. Ideally, two textiles, such as two similarly-sized quilts, will be rotated to allow each one six months on display followed by six months in an archival storage box kept in a safe location. For more information about this important subject, read the entire Displaying Textiles Handout, which is available with all of our free handouts in the resources section of the MTS website.
by Tegan Kehoe Apart from the familiar finds that I described in previous blog posts, and the fashions that are now vintage, the trove of old Needlecraft Magazines that Camille picked up contains some interesting parallels to the past. Since most of the issues we have copies of are from the early 1930’s, the concerns of the Great Depression are readily present. Much of it sounds familiar in our economically aware times – not just the concerns, but the way people turn to home crafts and do-it-yourself projects to save money or just to find new and affordable hobbies. Old advertisements are an especially interesting window into the past, and the advertisements in Needlecraft during the Depression are very clearly targeted at money-conscious homemakers. One advertisement for baking powder starts off, “Getting married on $20 a week takes courage nowadays.” It lists the costs of the materials for a chocolate cake. The message? “It doesn’t pay to use a cheap, unreliable baking powder,” because you can’t risk a cake that doesn’t rise. A series of advertisements for Lux brand cleaner shows teenage girls distressed over having to wear stockings with mended holes in them. The advertisements claim that their product is gentler than cake soap and saves stocking elasticity, prolonging the life of the stockings. Remember that in 1934, even women and girls who were not well-off wore silk stockings daily, as nylon stockings were not yet available. In the January 1938 issue of Needlecraft, there’s an article you’d be unlikely to see in a magazine today. “Here Are Scotch Ways to be Thrifty: Economy and Good Looks Combine in Smart Scotch Designs and Fabrics” doesn’t make much sense to a modern ear, in fact, I had to look up the word Scotch to figure out what I was missing. As it turns out, calling someone “Scotch” is a now-obscure and offensive way to say they are thrifty. The article, which describes a number of crafts projects using plaid, thistle motifs, and green and purple scraps in home decorating, is based on punning two meanings of the word Scotch. The magazine rarely references the economic condition of the times directly, but an exception is in the February 1934 issue. In an editor’s notes column titled “Our Rural Women Carry On,” the magazine quotes Dr. Warburton, director of extension work for the USDA. “Farm women have made a valiant effort to maintain a desirable standard of living for their families, in spite of the conditions during the last ten years.” Dr. Warburton’s report describes women selling products from their gardens to supplement the main family income and reviving home industries to save money. “They make cheese and soap, can and cure meats, and can and dry vegetables and fruits.” The magazine also has a number of advertisements and some articles about canning and similar projects. A lot has changed since the 1930’s, but considering that there’s been another resurgence of homemade products and canning in the last few years, not to mention in knitting and other crafts, it seems like people’s instinct to make something creative in the face of difficulty has not changed. While Museum Textile Services specializes in a different type of window into the past, the textiles themselves, these issues of Needlecraft Magazine have given us a lot to think about.
By Camille Myers Breeze A new year means a new set of exciting projects here at MTS. On the top of our priority list is a contract for our most impressive digital textile printing project to date. We are undertaking the replication of a set of silk bed hangings, which were purchased by Charles Francis Adams (1807–1886), son of John Quincy Adams, and his wife Abigail Brooks Adams (1808–1889). In the recent past, these luxurious textiles were deinstalled from the third floor of the Old House at the Adams National Historical Park due to their fragile condition. In 1999, I was part of a team of textile professionals who published one of the first articles on the use of digitally printed textiles in museums. Since then, much has changed in the fast-paced world of technology, including in the digital printing of textiles. In the upcoming months, we will work with a digital printing company in the Boston area to reproduce yardage of a similar fabric using cotton, which can mimic the appearance of silk with much better preservation properties. The digitally printed fabric will then be assembled into a replica set of bed hangings and installed in the third floor bedroom where they were previously displayed. Stay tuned for more blogs about this project as the work begins in January, 2013.
|