With 30,000+ newsletter readers and 7,000+ Instagram followers, we love providing our community with a look into our world of conservation. Looking back at 2022, here are our most popular videos of the year!
Pressure-Sensitive Tape Removal
Pressure-sensitive tape may not be a familiar product name, but it is one of the most familiar items in homes and offices worldwide. Pressure-sensitive tape is commonly known by brand names like Scotch Tape or Sellotape or common names such as sticky tape or packing tape. Unlike other kinds of tape, it does not adhere when heat or water is applied, but with pressure. Paper can be torn, cut, or even folded and unfolded so often that the creases begin to separate. Conservators often treat artwork with previous repair attempts, and frequently, those non-professional campaigns on works on paper involve pressure-sensitive tapes. Pressure-sensitive tapes seem like a quick fix, but the resulting condition issues caused can be difficult to treat. This short video showcases the slow and careful process of mechanical removal of the pressure-sensitive tapes.
Gilded Frame Cleaning
We all need a good clean sometimes - and frames are no exception! Watch as the surface of this frame comes back to life
Fitting a New Frame Liner
"Fitting a new liner into an existing ornate frame from the 1800s required creative solutions. Bendable mending plates and standard offsets were both used to keep the liner and the art safely and securely in the frame." Watch as Senior Conservation Framer Scott Dietrich refits this antique family photography back into the frame.
Surface Cleaning Antique Photography
One hundred twenty years of dust, grime, soot, and age - the early twentieth-century membership photographs from the Chicago chapter of the Scottish Rite showed their years. The photographs were taken and developed by the Gibson, Sykes & Fowler studio, one of Chicago's earliest photography studios that opened circa 1860. The silver mirroring present on the silver gelatin prints was reduced using the appropriate aqueous solutions with cotton swabs. In the video, the gelatin prints come back to life after cleaning.
Unraveling Paper and Parchment
Step one of separating paper and parchment: While still rolled together, the two documents were humidified passively in a Goretex package for 24 hours. Once humidified, the conservator carefully separated the documents by physically unrolling each section by hand.
