I had no idea that to stabilize would be such a good option! Thank you so much for educating me and for your much appreciated evaluation and suggestions!
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I have attended three seminars about repair, restoration, and stabilization. The seminars were given by people on the cutting edge of this kind of thing. Repair and restoration usually involves sewing or otherwise altering the original piece. Many museums now see this as damaging the artifact. Now days one of the things museums do is to build a special frame which holds the artifact secure to avoid additions damage. The museum might put acid free cloth of a color that matches the artifact behind any holes or split seams to help hide the defects. Other times acid free cloth, often of a mess design, is sewn in using threads thinner than a human hair to sew it to the artifact so the damage to the artifact is kept to a minimum.
Some of the motivation of the move to stabilization was the repairs done in the 1950s and 1960s did sever damage to artifacts that are now permeant. For example take a Civil War flag and sew it to cotton cloth. This caused thousands of needle holes in the flag and the slight vibrations caused by the heat in the display case rubbed the silk flag on the cotton and the silk designated. Flags were also coated in plastic or other materials which greatly damaged the silk or cotton the flag was made of. All this damage done to artifacts caused a move to simply stabilize artifacts.
Flags are a completely different ballgame and considerable damage has been done to silk flags over the years by experienced conservators, not knowing what we now know. Uniforms though need stabilization and many times repair. Case in point is the James Clark kepi (pictures below) that at the time these pictures were taken was getting ready for repair at the Museum of the Confederacy, now The American Civil War Museum, in Richmond, VA. The sweatband and brim had become detached, so original thread was sought and the band was lightly tacked back into place, the brim was waiting for a more professional attachment. The trick to brim repair, according to Les Jensen, now one of the curators at West Point Museum, is to make sure you use original thread and go through the same holes in the brim as originally used.
Stabilization and repair are many times necessary when it comes to both uniforms and headgear, otherwise buttons, chinstraps, brims etc. may become lost from their original home, particularly in museums that can only display a fraction of what they have.
Conservator, Cathy Wright gave us an amazing tour, of the underbelly of the MOC, back in 2016, sadly for us, Cathy married and moved to Scotland with her husband.
In the pictures you can see how the kepi has been stored, with the acid free tissue balled up to keep the form, while it is waiting for conservation. We asked to see what Maryland headgear they had and this was the extent of their collection. The cap is amazing in its state of condition and that it actually has two chinstraps and Louisiana Pelican buttons. Les Jensen told me he had some documentation on the kepi and it entailed the reason for the buttons, but we never reconnected on that topic. Clark never served in a Louisiana unit.