| In our previous blog post we talked about Lily Yeats and her role in the Arts and Crafts movement in Ireland. Today we will be discussing the various methods used to conserve and frame this historic embroidery, which will be on display at the McMullen Museum at Boston College from February 5 to June 6, 2016, as a part of the exhibit “The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making it Irish.” When Museum Textile Services received the embroidery it was mounted onto an acidic board behind a gold paper mat inside an oak frame. The ground silk was wrapped around to the back side of the board and strung with orange linen thread. The mounted object was quite a bit smaller than its frame. |  Embroidery by Lily Yeats and Brigid O'Brien, John J. Burns Library, Boston College. |
In order to center the mounted embroidery into the frame, someone had taped it to the back of the gold window mat. MTS conservator Cara Jordan was able to be remove most of the tape mechanically with limited loss of silk. Small areas of tape that were more difficult to remove were humidified, allowing Cara eventually to lift the tape from the silk.
 Tape on the reverse of the embroidery. |  One edge being humidified, |  The edge after tape was removed. |
In order to remount the embroidery, the orange lacing had to be removed. The thread was cut in a few key spots, after which it was easily unlaced from the silk ground. The orange thread was too weak to reuse, so it was returned to the client. To our surprise, the back corners and an area of deterioration on the front had been glued to the board. Cara successfully released these adhered areas with acetone.
| Cara remounted the embroidery onto a board of the same size as the original because the deep folds in the ground silk retained a memory of that shape. She lightly tensioned the embroidery around a new archival 8-ply board to which she had attached cotton poplin. While the embroidery was face up, it was hand stitched to the outer edge of the board using DMC cotton thread. It was then flipped over onto a padded surface and the folds of fabric were arranged on the back of the board before being hand stitched in place. The embroidery was then flipped face up again and Cara placed a network of hand stitching around the figures. Once the embroidery was properly mounted, the areas of damage were couched to the fabric-covered board with Gütermann Skala polyester thread. Since the newly mounted embroidery was smaller than the frame, Cara needed to make a spacer system to properly position the embroidery. She cut a ring of corrugated polypropylene and covered the interior edge with archival frame tape. A new gold mat was cut for the piece to hide the sharp line between the faded front and the still-green sides. The mat was adhered to the polypropylene spacer with archival double-stick tape. The embroidery was then framed behind UV-filtering glass in its oak frame. |  Mounted embroidery with the polypropylene spacer around it.  The unfaded bright green edge of the mounted embroidery.  The mounted embroidery with its mat adhered to the spacer. |
We hope that you are as excited to see this embroidery at the McMullen as we are!
 | Morgan Carbone has a BA in Art History from Grinnell College. She recently finished her Master of Arts degree in Fashion and Textile Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology. |
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