Sewing With Nancy

Do you have textile treasures hidden in the back of a closet? Perhaps it's an antique wedding dress, a treasured quilt that Grandma made, or even a smocked toddler dress. Regardless of the keepsake, I'd like you to learn how to preserve your personal textile collection. Please welcome Natasha Thoreson, who is from the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Welcome to Sewing with Nancy, Natasha. Thank you. I had the pleasure of giving you two of my treasured textiles, and you preserved them for me, 'cause I wasn't taking good care of them. And you have put my mother-in-law's dress, wedding dress, in a box, and tell us about what you do at the collection. Well, these are boxes that we might use in a collection or a museum collection. They're archival, and they're-- that means they're acid-free. Sure. And that's how I packaged your textiles, but if somebody wanted to do this at home and didn't want to purchase an acid-free box, they could certainly just use a regular cardboard box, and you would just line that cardboard box with tin--aluminum foil. - Sure. And you would do that just to keep that acid from leeching into your textile. So aluminum foil like you'd... - Mm-hmm. Make a pan of brownies and put aluminum-- Exactly. Exactly. And here's my mother-in-law's dress, which I haven't been taking-- I haven't taken good care of, but it really does look quite lovely the way you have it. And you stuffed the sleeves. I did stuff the sleeves. I stuffed, actually, every fold that was in the garment, which includes the skirt, the neckline, the sleeves--everything that I ended up folding was-- was filled with a little bit of tissue paper. And then you've made kind of rolls when this goes over and back itself-- we'll kind of hold this down, but there are several rolls in here to hold that in place. This textile with the train is three times the length of this box, so that is why there's the fold here. The zigzag. - Yep. Now, perhaps someone may want to hang this, but you chose not to. I chose not to just because of this organdy-- um, the top of the bodice, and I felt like the structure would keep it-- or the structure might cause some damage somewhere down the line. So you have a hint if you'd like to hang it. If you would like to hang it, you could use a padded hanger, something like this. It's just a regular hanger, wrapped with quilt batting and just a sewn, um... Hand-sewn muslin on the top. - Yep. And, you know, you want to make sure that the hanger isn't wider than the shoulders. It has to fit that particular garment. Then you could maybe make a muslin garment bag or simple sheet covering to go over it. Yes, you'd like-- you want to use muslin and not plastic. - Sure. Because textiles are like us. They want to breathe. - Breathe. Okay, so we'll wrap this up, and we'll go to the quilt that's underneath. Let's put this here. So I've had this quilt in-- hanging on a coat rack for many years, and it's from my great-grandmother, and it was kind of repaired, and-- and her name is Alice Lee Larson, and she's pictured on her wedding day-- I made a little label-- and married Theodore Larson, and she made this quilt in 1920. Wow. - August of 1920. And then her daughter-- which I recorded here-- Viola Thelma Larson, did some patching on it, and she gave it to me without any backing, and my aunt Viola put on-- you can see these kind of contemporary colors, she added that, and I added-- or we added the backing and the stitching, and then I put that I, Nancy Lee Luedtke Zieman, and my-- I'm named after Grandma Lee, so I put that in there, but that's more than you needed to know. What you need to know is that the textile is... again, preserved with your tissue. Yes, so-- the textile, everywhere that it's folded, there's a little sausage of tissue, and if you didn't want to purchase tissue paper-- this kind of acid-free tissue paper can be expensive-- you could make your own tube or sausage using stockinette and just quilt batting. And put it in the folds... so that it doesn't get a permanent-- now, where I-- every place it's fold-- Natasha has placed tissue or a little sausage to keep that in place. Great idea, so aluminum-foil-lined or an acid-free box, tissue wherever you're gonna have a fold, acid-free tissue to cover it up, and then you'll have that for generations to come. For generations to come. Exactly. I thank you for sharing this with us. I'm pleased to have these preserved. I know our viewers will too. I hope that you've enjoyed this series on making patchwork quilts from antique designs, and I thank Natasha. If you'd like to join us on Sewing with Nancy, you can watch online over and over again at NancyZieman.com. You can watch our interview or any part of our program and many programs more, again, at NancyZieman.com. Thanks for joining us. Bye for now.