Textile preservation: Keeping traditional fabrics safe
By Yvette Tan
Published Feb 17, 2023 12:05 am
AVANT GARDENER
Yvette Tan
Fashion designer and Filipiñana pioneer Patis Tesoro hosted a lunch for Florica Zaharia, PhD; Conservator Emerita of the The Metropolitan Museum of Art and director and co-owner of the Muzeul Textilelor in Romania.
The Muzeul Textilelor is the only textile museum in Eastern Europe. It is a private museum that exhibits textiles from around the world under the FARZ Collection (Florica, Ana and Romulus Collection), as well as the tools used to create them. Its mission includes, to take from their brochure, “preserving, collecting, researching, and sharing the Collection and other resources with specialists and the public.” Items in the FARZ Collection “reflects the variety of traditional textile materials and techniques used globally before the common era until today” and is “systematically and professionally created, and is focused on the technical aspects of textiles produced worldwide.”
Zaharia spoke about textile preservation techniques, particularly with regards to Philippine textiles such as piña. Here are some tips she offered:
Keep an inventory. “...know what kind of materials you have. Understand your materials. Most of your material is cellulose , right? Which has conditions and necessities different from protein ,” Zahria said. This way, you can begin to figure out the conditions they’ll need to be kept in to keep them from deteriorating. “If I will do it here (in the Philippines), I will take an environment and figure out how to stabilize, how to deal with these factors and start from there,” she added.
Control your elements. “Get as soon as you can, control on the humidity, which means close the windows, enclose the space, control temperature.., turn the light off, and assure you have some air circulation,” Zaharia said. “What you don’t want is to your collection somewhere where mildew will grow, where the insects can come in. you can have low temperature and low humidity, you will be in a better condition.”
Separate your textiles. “Don’t put on top of each other. Give them space because… stress is also a problem. Don’t store them in wood. Wood is not good because … the elements make the material more acidic. Find neutral material that you can work with,” she said.
Factor in cost. “One thing to remember… I am controlling the humidity, I am controlling the temperature, but I have costs related to them,” Zaharia said. “The reality… is somewhere in the middle.” Knowing one’s material means being better able to search for low-cost preservation alternatives. A simple solution, depending on the material, can be using boxes to encourage air circulation while keeping textiles safe. “My solution to that is I keep all the objects in boxes or in one flat roll and with layers of material. In the boxes there is a layer of material. Once you have that, you reduce air fluctuation, you reduce humidity and temperature fluctuation, so… let breathe.”
Learning to apply simple preservation techniques to local natural textiles like piña, abaca, and jusi can not only encourage these agriculture-driven industries, they also ensure that samples of these pieces of culture and tradition will be available to younger generations.
Yvette Tan
Fashion designer and Filipiñana pioneer Patis Tesoro hosted a lunch for Florica Zaharia, PhD; Conservator Emerita of the The Metropolitan Museum of Art and director and co-owner of the Muzeul Textilelor in Romania.
The Muzeul Textilelor is the only textile museum in Eastern Europe. It is a private museum that exhibits textiles from around the world under the FARZ Collection (Florica, Ana and Romulus Collection), as well as the tools used to create them. Its mission includes, to take from their brochure, “preserving, collecting, researching, and sharing the Collection and other resources with specialists and the public.” Items in the FARZ Collection “reflects the variety of traditional textile materials and techniques used globally before the common era until today” and is “systematically and professionally created, and is focused on the technical aspects of textiles produced worldwide.”
Zaharia spoke about textile preservation techniques, particularly with regards to Philippine textiles such as piña. Here are some tips she offered:
Keep an inventory. “...know what kind of materials you have. Understand your materials. Most of your material is cellulose , right? Which has conditions and necessities different from protein ,” Zahria said. This way, you can begin to figure out the conditions they’ll need to be kept in to keep them from deteriorating. “If I will do it here (in the Philippines), I will take an environment and figure out how to stabilize, how to deal with these factors and start from there,” she added.
Control your elements. “Get as soon as you can, control on the humidity, which means close the windows, enclose the space, control temperature.., turn the light off, and assure you have some air circulation,” Zaharia said. “What you don’t want is to your collection somewhere where mildew will grow, where the insects can come in. you can have low temperature and low humidity, you will be in a better condition.”
Separate your textiles. “Don’t put on top of each other. Give them space because… stress is also a problem. Don’t store them in wood. Wood is not good because … the elements make the material more acidic. Find neutral material that you can work with,” she said.
Factor in cost. “One thing to remember… I am controlling the humidity, I am controlling the temperature, but I have costs related to them,” Zaharia said. “The reality… is somewhere in the middle.” Knowing one’s material means being better able to search for low-cost preservation alternatives. A simple solution, depending on the material, can be using boxes to encourage air circulation while keeping textiles safe. “My solution to that is I keep all the objects in boxes or in one flat roll and with layers of material. In the boxes there is a layer of material. Once you have that, you reduce air fluctuation, you reduce humidity and temperature fluctuation, so… let breathe.”
Learning to apply simple preservation techniques to local natural textiles like piña, abaca, and jusi can not only encourage these agriculture-driven industries, they also ensure that samples of these pieces of culture and tradition will be available to younger generations.