Hi, everyone. Happy New Year. I just want to remind you that this program connecting to collections care is sponsored by the Foundation of American Institute for Conservation with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and technical support from Learning Times. And we provide free training, resources, and assistance for collections care for small and mid-sized cultural institutions. So we're really happy to be here. This is now we've been running this program as Connecting to Collections Care for New Year. And I want to thank you for our successful first year. So we'll get started. If you need quick answers about collections care problems, you can listen in the online community forum. There are conservators who are paying attention, making sure that those questions get answered. The only thing is you need to be registered to ask a question and registered and have a password. It's really easy. You'll see it on the website. This is the community website connecting to collections. Oh my god, I'm sorry, two is missing from that. We're on Facebook, and you can follow us on Twitter. You can contact me anytime at this email address. And coming up, we have a webinar on caring for framed objects in February and one on mannequins in March. And today's webinar is on historic furniture. So I'm going to turn this over to Todd. Thank you. The title of our talk today is a conservation primer caring for historic furniture. My name is Tad Fallon, and I'm one of the principal conservators at Fallon and Wilkinson LLC in Baltic, Connecticut. So welcome all and thank you for logging in this afternoon. I would like to extend thanks to the Connecting to Collections Care online community and Learning Times for this great program opportunity. So I'll go over briefly the talk outline for today. And first what I'll do is I'll introduce our firm, which is Fallon and Wilkinson Studio. And the work we do are capabilities and a little bit about our facility. Then I'll briefly discuss what a conservator does, specifically a wooden objects conservator, how we go about examining objects, sort of what we're looking for, and how we go about it. We'll talk a little bit about examining the surface, deciphering patina, and recognizing past interventions. I'll talk a little bit about reproductions and how they can help in a variety of situations, briefly go over an introduction to wood identification. And then lastly, we'll follow up with the dos and don'ts of furniture care. And I'll extend some practical tips to you all for collections maintenance. So as we begin today's talk, I'll briefly introduce our company, Fallon and Wilkinson LLC. The two principal partners in our firm, myself and Randy Wilkinson, initially met in graduate school at the Smithsonian Institution's Conservation Analytical Laboratory in 2006. As we progressed through the intensive four-year program and learned more about each other's skill sets and talents, we began to discuss the possibility of forming a business alliance upon graduation. In the fall of 2000, that plan became a reality and Fallon and Wilkinson LLC was established. And with time, the business grew by leaps and bounds. In 2008, we purchased property in the town of Baltic, Connecticut and designed and built the state-of-the-art conservation facility we now call home. We have three other employees, Dutch trained conservator, fellow metropolitan museum of art alumni, and Mr. Wilkinson's wife, Rianne Durenberg Wilkinson, a very talented woodworker and fellow fashion Institute of Technology alumni, Leslie Dockere, and our aspiring young studio assistant, Devion Knowles. We are considered conservators in private practice. Our studio is climate-controlled and secure. And our clients really have a wide spectrum ranging from small and medium-sized museums, insurance companies, private collectors, and homeowners. So why call a conservator? Or just what the heck do you guys do anyway? Well, there are many things to take into consideration when deciding how to treat an object. Intervention needs thoughtful consideration. This rings as true for valuable museum-level objects as it does for humble, cherished, personal possessions. This picture, which became infamous, is Echohomo, or Behold the Man. And it became infamous because it was painted in 1930 by the Spanish painter Elias Garcia Martinez, and it's picturing Jesus crowned with thorns. And the reason it became famous was because it kind of underwent an ill-attempt restoration attempt by an untrained amateur in 2012. And the only reason I illustrate it, number one, I mean, it's seen around the world on various mems and online. But number two, just to kind of illustrate the idea that even valuable and important objects can receive damage when things go wrong and the wrong people get involved or well-meaning people get involved and are untrained. So it's something that we just need to be diligent even though it's very obvious. And our experience as furniture conservators tell us that things do happen. This is a case where the Butler McCook House, which is a beautiful 18th century house located now in downtown Hartford, Connecticut, had just underwent a $4 million renovation several years in the making. And about two weeks after it opened, an SUV ran a red light late at night and crashed through the main parlor, damaging extensively the collections. And in the background of that slide, you see the SUV parked in the living room and the firefighters taking a beautiful 18th century high boy out of the house. So although this is an extreme example, we do know that things happen and there may be times when small house museums or small, you know, and to medium to large museums will need to call in trained conservators. So I'll briefly go over some of the ways in which you can try to find a conservator. And the reason I illustrate this is that it will help you begin the process on a professional level and not just rely on complete word of mouth to find the right person. So the first thing I would suggest is looking at the American Institute for Conservation website. And I've listed the website there. It's also in the handouts. And they have a find a conservator feature which is in the upper left hand corner of the homepage. And you can type by zip code, by proximity to your location and by specialty group. And it's quite a good referral system. The conservators that will be referred in that system are professional associates or fellows. And I think that's a great place to start if you're starting fresh with finding a conservator. One of the things that you should be looking for if you are hiring or taking the services of a conservator is that they follow the AIC, the American Institute for Conservation Code of Ethics. And this is a code that we are bound by as conservators to do the right thing. And that code about this, if you're not familiar with it, is listed on the AIC website. The first thing that a conservator will do if you procure their services will be to look at an object and do an examination and an assessment. And at this stage it's very important, and this is the part where you can go a great length to doing your own homework and your own legwork, is you can have a discussion of your treatment goals. And you can do that among yourselves in the institution first. Because it's very important we often get a broad ranging array of questions. And I think that the more focused you are on what your own treatment goals for this piece or this object are, we can give you better options as conservators. So it's something to hone in on and do your homework before the conservator comes in to do their examination and assessment. The next thing in the process would be that the conservator would issue you a treatment proposal based on the discussion of treatment goals and give you a range of potentially of options that would hone in on what the treatment would look like. Now that's not always a set point and a fixed point because as a further examination at the studio occurs, often a conservator will find additional things to make you aware of. And so that can be part of the process. You should expect documentation. And the reason I put level depends is that not everything needs a high degree of documentation, sometimes a written form of documentation for a simple treatment will suffice, but high end documentation may involve things like microscopy, it may involve photography on a level documenting the steps within the treatment. And really it depends on your budget and the amount of time that you're willing to put into that documentation. So it can vary. The last thing that should be happening in hiring a conservator is that they should issue a final treatment report along with their invoice that sort of outlines to a degree what they did. And again, this goes back to the level depends. It should be part and parcel with the documentation. So those are the sort of things that I think you'll find you should expect in hiring and working with a professional conservator. So I will talk briefly about this beautiful piece and this is a great example of how our team of conservators will come together with a project that require a great variety of skills to successfully complete. This is a wonderful 18th century, possibly Frothingham, Massachusetts desk and bookcase that has been continually in the same family, originally made for the first senator of Vermont, Moses Robinson. And it retained a fantastic old finish and patina. But as you see, if you look at the base, it had lost its original height due to losses to the fee. Now this may have been by a well-intentioned owner at some point who perhaps just didn't have the ceiling height because they were very well taken down evenly. But nonetheless, the piece was reduced. So the new family member requested that as conservators we add on to the height of it. So there's a detail of the base with this wonderful patina and great differential color on the foot. And what do we do as conservators to take care of that? So we'll talk briefly here in the next slide about what we're gonna do is we're going to add on to the fee, but we will not remove any original material in doing that. So we'll carefully carve our repair elements into the existing outline of the foot and not remove anything original. So you see that slide there, the new piece has been added on and sort of carefully clamped on. And there is the new foot integrated and very flush and even with the surrounding surface. But if you look, there's no disturbing the original surface underneath that. There's the piece integrated. So if one were to shine a blacklight on it, that you could readily tell that the materials were different, but visually it's basically integrates so well that it's hard to tell from standing height that anything was done. So again, we want to make that visual impression, but if you flipped it upside down and looked inside, you would see that you're not fooling anyone that this is an intervention and a later addition. And there's the piece completed. And the finish was just cleaned and waxed and the brasses were cleaned and ink-relacked, which I'll go into later in the talk when we talk about things that you can do in your own practice or your own museum to kind of help preserve the brasses and have less ability to have to polish them. So that was an illustration in the previous slides of more of a structural issue. Next, we'll talk a little bit about coatings and the aspects of finished conservation that we get into. Now, this is a beautiful piece here, which is a fantastic Salem writing desk dating from about 1805 or so that came in with a variety of issues. In addition to repairing losses and structural work, the finish had just severely degraded over time and the object was really no longer aesthetically pleasing. The grime and weathering overrode the beauty of the rich mahogany veneer. In order to better understand the nature of an existing finish, as conservators, sometimes we will take with the client's permission a tiny cross-section of the surface that includes both wood and finish and examine the sample under our research microscope in both visible and ultraviolet light. So here you can see the stratigraphy of the wood cells and that's the lower section in here and the little middle section is the yellow-orange line of original shellac varnish that was on there, right in there. And then the upper white and bluish layers represent later overcoatings. And so we can see those. So the other thing that I would note is when you go down to the cells of the wood and you look in the cellular structure kind of in the middle of the field of that slide, you'll see that the upper level of the cells are compressed and as it gets deeper into the wood they're more circular and oval. And so what that represents to a conservator looking at that is that that probably was a hand scraped surface and that compressed the wood during the finishing and sanding process and scraping process and that surface with the yellow-orange florescing thing and those compressed cells indicate a very undisturbed original surface underneath everything. So it kind of shows us, it illustrates that, yes this piece has had later finished work done but there is a good deal of original material on there and it's underneath. So we can say to the client, what is on top is probably obscuring what you're seeing and obscuring the presentation surface. So here this slide, we're seeing this degraded surface which also was what we call very friable. It wasn't adhering well and it was sort of flaking off which was a problem for the client. So what we did is we carefully took off, reduced and cleaned the surface and we maintained the underlying color and richly patinated mahogany surface but brought out the presentation surface and then we additively brighten the surface with an additive reversible varnish so that you could get a lens back and see this. Now there's never one right way to treat an object. So this was all optioned and given the options and the evidence to the client and then ultimately we let them make the decision which was that the presentation surface was paramount in this piece and that's what really needed to show up at the end. So we worked to that means and it was all documented so if anyone ever wanted to go back they'd be able to tell why we made our decisions and I think that's sometimes just as important as documenting the steps is providing future conservators with a reason why you did it in a synopsis that can be very helpful for future looks at objects. So another aspect that a professional conservator especially a wooden objects conservator can do sometimes for a project is provide research analysis and treatment. So this is a unique piece made by a contemporary studio furniture maker named John Cedarquist who works in California and John is well celebrated in the permanent collections of major institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery and the Smithsonian Institution to name a few. This piece in question we see here on the far left is titled Mr. Chips and was made in 2005 or six and is part of the COSIDO or Kimono Form Cabinet series that John produced during this period. His pieces are unique constructions combining two-dimensional inlaid images and three-dimensional furniture forms which cross the boundary of reality into illusion and his inspiration comes from diverse sources including Japanese block prints, Mickey Mouse and Popeye cartoons and popular iconography from east to west. The client purchased this piece at the Cedarquist show opening night at Franklin Parish Gallery in New York in early 2006. It was installed in a grand with a stunning view of the Connecticut countryside and here we see the series in John's studio some of the pieces just before they went out to the gallery show in New York. So this is the grand room where the piece was established for a number of years and it sat in a tremendous three-story atrium getting hammered by this whole time. So unfortunately there was not enough UV protection in the viewing space and over a relatively short timeframe we see severe fading of the brightly colored decorated surface. So you see the 2006 original image on the left and 2013 image on the right. So in dealing with contemporary art there are a number of complex ethical and market value considerations to ponder before undertaking treatment. So we decided to contact the artist in this case and see if his input could be part of any proposed treatment. To my great delight John was very forthcoming and invited us out to his studio to develop a treatment strategy. John was very generous and worked with me to map out with precise detail the color formulas, airbrush application techniques and specific varnishes he uses in his fabrications and approve the restoration of the piece. I presented this research and treatment at the AIC meeting which was held in San Francisco last year. So here's a piece with the color restored and this shows you after John's intervention what was done was it was an additive and artist involved restoration of the piece according to his original specifications. So it's kind of a rare opportunity as a conservator to work along those lines sort of as a guided studio assistant to restore the piece to original specs. And I illustrate it because it's very different process and thinking than dealing with patina and 18th and 19th century furniture which has a history of use. We're talking about something that has a very specific presentation surface and needed a very specific type of research and treatment to have a successful intervention. So now I'll talk a little bit about when we are examining surfaces deciphering patina and past interventions. This is important because as you're making your decisions as to how a piece should look for exhibit purposes, what's been done to it. Sometimes these little tips can help and it will help you to start looking at furniture in a new light. So this is an 18th century rush seat side chair that came into the studio from New England and this is just a wonderful piece. Most of the pieces, this piece exhibits this sort of Spanish brown color that you see and originally it came into the studio because the rush seat was degraded and the client was feeling like the piece was a little bit dingy and dark and they were asking us what we could do to clean it. Now as we began looking at it, we began to realize that this piece was a Spanish brown color and it had a wonderful old patina and hold on one sec, I'm sorry. And so what happened with this piece was that if you look at carefully at the striations in the flats of that turning, you can start to realize that this piece had an undisturbed original surface. So when we're dealing with a client about deciphering patina, we're explaining that yes it does look dirty and it looks old but essentially had never been scraped or refinished and that paint was fairly well adhered and represented an early distemper finish which was glue, animal protein glue mixed with pigments to create this Spanish brown. So we're advising the client, no let's retain this surface and let's do everything we can to preserve it because it's a very rare survivor. So we did cross section analysis and we determined that the original layer of distemper protein binder was intact on the surface and it was discontinuous but it was certainly worth retaining and again just illustrates a really rare survivor from the 18th century. So here we see just a beautiful joint chest made in Guilford, Connecticut, 1705 to 25, Seybrook or Guilford. It's oak, tulip, poplar, pine and paint and this was exhibited at the Florence Griswold Museum in this wonderful exhibition Thistles and Crowns, the Painted Chests of the Connecticut Shore and had a wonderful exhibition by Ben Coleman, the curator at the time. And so we're gonna take a little deeper look at this section of the drawer right here and you can see the arrow pointing to it and illustrate a little bit more about how we go. So if we're deciphering past interventions in this case, we're looking at the decorative painted surface and we're trying to decipher what's original decoration and what potentially has been additively done to the piece over the years. So here is a more magnified shot and if we look very carefully, the varnish is fairly well over the repair or the damaged dented areas. So as we start examining the piece, we realize it certainly at least has been overvarnished at one point but we'll go a little deeper and we'll use different light sources and oftentimes raking light and we'll see that patina has been crushed a little right in here and the wood's been crushed and there's a little bit of red oxide paint that went with it. Here's another shot magnified where we see this white line and if you look carefully, you see the brown varnish under the middle of the field and then there's raw wood areas that still have the white over it. So as we start examining this closer, we realize that probably those white lines were additively put in later. Perhaps there was a faint outline of them existing but they're likely a later campaign of restoration or sprucing up at one point. And here again, you see the same thing and this is what good magnification or even a stereo microscope can tell you, in this case, we're using a dinolite which is a small handheld microscope that can magnify about 25 times and give you much greater detail. This is where a conservator can kind of help you determine the state of the piece and where past interventions were. So here's this little upper section of the drawer we'll go into now here. We'll take a little closer look at that. And again, this is with the dinolite so we're gonna go from looking at it with our eyes and now we're gonna go into handheld microscopy to get a little deeper look. And here we see the varnish and a very magnified surface of this wonderful paint underneath here in this tulip decoration and there we see that the piece has in this different light which is more of a raking light. We can see that the varnish is over top of the paint so it's likely that this piece has been over varnished at some point in its light but the varnish was well adhered and it wasn't posing any visual problem for the piece so we would opt to certainly not disturb it at that point. So now I'll talk a little bit about reproductions why they make sense for a variety of reasons and talk a little bit about whether you're requesting or wanting a replica or a reproduction. So this was a series of pieces that we were commissioned to do Fallon and Wilkinson was commissioned to do by Hamilton Grange New York which is Alexander Hamilton's home which was turned into a national park site in 2009 or 10. And they had the original furnishings plan for the house but they had none of the original pieces which were scattered in museums throughout the country. So we were commissioned to make exact copies that really would be called replicas as opposed to reproductions because they were as faithfully executed as possible. If there was a dimensional change in wood from one side of the case to the other it was executed that way. All the wood was matched, microscopy was done so that we knew the original woods used and they were used in the reproduction or the replica. And the reason I illustrate this is there are times when as a small house museum or a museum in general would benefit from getting a reproduction made.  It can be something that an institution wishes they had but is in another collection but it might be interpretively important to their collection. So there's just a variety of reasons and it really can run the gamut from a semi-faithful copy to an exacting copy as we see here. So this scope of work was 26 pieces of federal furniture and all which were built over a two-year process. So here you can see a mix of the old and new chairs in suite and there was a wonderful project adding out. This was a sofa that was not in the collection but they needed it to go with the parlor suite so it was built to match. And this was a case where the finishes were carefully matched within existing surfaces so we weren't making a reproduction that looked new we were making reproductions that blended into an old collection which was another consideration so we were patentating and toning and antiquing the surface but again if you looked inside you would see that this is indeed new. We weren't trying to fool anyone. Here's a sideboard from the same thing beautiful New York in late sideboard and again this beautiful old mellow patina was put on the piece. Here's a kind of a fun story. This was a piece that was in the collection of the White House during the Bush administration. It was given by a donor who requested that it eventually go to the Reagan Library and upon Reagan's president Reagan's death the White House was specified to return the piece to the Reagan Library. And at that time it was in the state dining room and the Bush administration wanted the podium because it was used at state functions often and I guess they were fond of it. So Fallon Wilkinson was commissioned to do a copy so Randy Wilkinson who's the other partner in the firm went down to Washington and faithfully copied castings of the piece and dimensions and then brought the work back to the studio leaving the original in place and executed it. And then the final phase was to get the two pieces side by side in an offsite location outside of the White House and tone and guild the eagle. And then it was delivered and it still resides to this day in the state dining room. You can sometimes see it on C-SPAN or different state functions when they show the state dining room. And here's our current president surely toasting our wonderful work for this podium. So now I'm gonna go into an area admittedly a little outside of my wheelhouse but introduction to Wood ID. Randy Wilkinson who's the other partner in the firm is really the resident Wood ID expert and teaches that subject throughout the country but I'll have borrowed some of his slides here and I'm gonna go through sort of a unique approach that Randy's developed here. It's kind of integrating how as conservators we approach identifying wood which I think is a contrast to how Wood ID has been taught in the past where it's sort of clinical and outside of the craft tradition. And what Randy has developed is a concept now and his teaching is that how we can integrate what we know as conservators and as woodworkers into the field of studying wood and make better sense and better decisions about how we go about identifying wood on objects. So a brief set of things here to look at is a conservator approaches identifying wood with a keen sense of pattern recognition. Initially starts at low magnification often just a hand loop or higher magnification with a dinolite which is the handheld plug-in microscope that attaches to a computer or big picture stuff and then finally lastly going towards high magnification microscopy which would be kind of a last step. So looking at the decision process that's gone through is looking on the left hand here is what wood is it? What is your first impression? Look at it is, is it a hardwood or a softwood? Talk and identify what you feel the color of the wood is. Think a little bit about its density, how heavy the piece feels. Hazard to guess, what does it seem like based on your past knowledge of looking at wood? And then lastly we'll say do the cellular features support your guess? And the other important considerations and this is where this blending of the skills comes into place is does it follow craft tradition? If one starts to follow cabinet making traditions there will be certain wood choices and wood uses that make sense or don't make sense. And sometimes that can give you some information. For instance, is what you're looking at original or is it replaced? Given the geographic origin of the object is it possible? And then do the trade routes given the history of the piece and where it should be placed in time? Do the trade routes support that conclusion? So it's really taking wood idea and looking at it in a much more holistic way to come up with a process of identifying what's happening. So to illustrate that we'll go back to a chest of drawers from the Florence Griswold exhibition, Thistles and Crowns. And again, this is a piece dating from Saybrook or Guilford, 1705 to 1725. And the accession records read that it's a chest of drawers. Again, 1705 to 25, Saybrook or Guilford and it's oak, tulip, poplar, and pine. So these accession records are by eye there's no microscopy records for the piece. So when we look a little closer we can really look on the inside of the piece and we can start determining that in this case, yes, this is original material and looking at it is fairly easy to discern that this is oak on the inside of the unvarnished and unpainted area and that we're looking at pine on the inside. And so a conservator at that point should be able to tell really without microscopy to positively identify those surfaces because there's no oxidation that is obscuring anything and there's no surface decoration in the way. But if we go a little deeper and look at the end grain of the dovetail there is a wonderful burnished surface on the end grain of the dovetail that gives us a complete transverse cross section which means that it's sort of the end grain of the piece which exposes some cellular features that we can use to identify the wood. So this can happen in this case without microscopy so we don't need to do any destructive examination to determine the grain of the wood and the species of the wood. So here it is magnified 25 times on the right and again we see the porosity of the wood. We see the growth ring line intersecting the field there and then we go a little higher magnification to 50 and we see a cellular feature of noted rays which is on the right reference of a known popular reference sample and we can see that they match. And then the conclusion is that the oak styles and rails were not needed any microscopy to make positive identification or the pine panels and the drawer sides and back were popular which we did with just a simple magnification process and no cross sections would need it to be taken. So it shows you that if you're looking for wood ID a good trained conservator can go to great lengths to positively identify that for catalog or other reasons. I'll mention here that yearly on a yearly basis in the fall Randy teaches a wood identification workshop. It's always held concurrently with Yale University Art Gallery's study collection and the first day of the workshop will be at Fallon and Wilkinson studio which will be teaching you to positively identify wood and on the second day Randy takes you to the Furniture Study Center and has a great day of looking at pieces. And what's important here is because we're looking at pieces in the field, on site. How do you examine a piece? What are you looking for? How much can you tell with just taking the piece, draw out looking at it and things like that and especially learning to decipher wood that's under a vanished surface which is often what we're dealing with. So there's some great coursework to be had there and again keep an eye out for our website which I've given in the contact info and keep an eye for that in the fall of 2016 if you're interested. It fills up very quick in our past experience. So now I'm gonna go into a little bit of practical information for you about the do's and don'ts of furniture care. And this will kind of hopefully hone in on things that you can do, what you can do on your own. So one of the real simple things in this I think when you're dealing with a small house museum or a small institution and you have areas of storage that you're concerned with humidity control is a simple digital hygrometer pictured here on the left. They're readily available, you can find them online and it will just give you a day-to-day readout. It's not a data logger, it's just something very simple to keep an eye on the temperature and the relative humidity. The big thing that you wanna keep an eye out for is spikes in humidity and spikes in temperature. You wanna try to keep the relative humidity as close to 50%, certainly no lower than 30 and you don't want it to go much above 60. And if you can do that, you're going great lengths to keeping the objects in your collection stable. On the right is pictured a pretty simple sears, five gallon drum humidifier and sometimes in a winter heating environment, low humidity is the big concern. And in order to, on a very grassroots, easy level integrate more humidity into the room, one of these drum humidifiers, although they are a little bit of a maintenance issue because they need to be filled daily, we in our early studio used one for many years with great success and it can be a very low tech, cost effective way to ensure that you have enough humidification in your house and that you're not driving down the moisture too much. So hand in hand, these two items can go a long way. So this graph illustrates the winter and summer seasons and essentially what we see is that in the winter we're down in the low part of the trough where moisture content and wood can be driven very low to dangerously low levels in an unmitigated environment. And then in the high peak of that graph, you see the summer humidity, which is moisture content above 12%. And it's that up and down, the peaks and the valleys, that's what damages wooden objects the most. So if you can through your modification of the environment avoid those spikes in humidity during the summer months and avoid the low humidity environment in the winter and kind of make that little middle ground, which you see that squiggle line that goes across, make those spikes less. You can go a great way towards having your objects stabilized. And again, very low tech way, if you don't have an integrated HVAC system, that low tech method with the modifying your placement of humidification systems throughout the house by portable method can go a great length towards helping things out. So again, we see this relative humidity content where at 75% relative humidity, you're at 14% moisture content in wood in the summer. And then if you drive down to 20% relative humidity, which is low, but really not the lowest I've seen, you're down to 4.5 and that's what it will crack objects is when they absorb a great deal of moisture in an unmitigated environment in the summer. And then in the first season of heating, you're driving down that moisture content and that's when wood reacts and will split and crack, especially if it has what we call inherent vice or restricted movement in the joinery. It'll be at risk for cracking. So again, just keeping an eye and understanding a little bit about those fluctuations will help keep an eye on things for you. This is a very common thing that we get asked here at the studio and furniture conservators deal with and certainly as a maintenance item for houses with collections, you go into is that people wanna clean the brass. And I would say that in general the decision to clean brasses or not is very personal and probably curatorial about whether it's appropriate to do it or not. And I think that the big thing you wanna avoid though is cleaning with products in place that will create a residue like we see in this field here where a cleaning product probably knocks on that has ammonia and pumice stone particles in it will do a lot of damage to the surface. It will etch the finish and it's often builds up over time underneath the plate. So this is a drawer from a Boston block front chest which has the, we took the little back plate off and you're seeing the corrosion product underneath that plate.  So you really don't wanna do that. If you do need to clean a piece in place, I'm gonna give you some tips about doing that but effectively removing them and considering using what we call a removable coatings program for your brasses. So this is just an illustration where on the left we see a slightly cleaned and unvarnished surface. And on the right, we see a cleaned and varnished surface. And the varnish we used is called Incralac and that's in your handout as well. And the Incralac is a museum acrylic coating for brass that will allow you to get after you clean the brass off the object and then coat it which is simply brushing it on to the piece. You will have the ability to have a much greater length in between cleanings of hardware. So if you can do that and you want your brasses bright, it's a great way to have your conservator or have staff with conservators approval looking at the piece. Is it appropriate to use a removable coatings program for your brasses? It's something to ask and something certainly to consider. I think that when you need to call a conservator is when you see obvious damage that is getting worse. Like on the left, you see water damage or delaminating or buckling veneer that has the potential to be, for instance, snagged on cleaning cloths. If you have on the right a painted surface that is very flaky and friable. When you see things that just don't look right, then I think it's time, perhaps to call and consult with a conservator. Oftentimes that conversation can be initiated with a phone call and with an email with a carefully outlined set of questions and photographs. And often that goes to great lengths to getting some answers out of the way in the beginning. And I think these days it's very easy to shoot pictures and send them either with your phone or with a camera and get them to a conservator. But that's when I would say, you know, it's time to call a conservator. It's surprising how many clients even in small house museums will have plants either seasonally or for holiday decorations and they'll water them. And even with well-intentioned plastic or glass on the table, water can seep under. So we just really recommend, but it's probably an obvious thing, but it's surprising how often pieces get damaged by that type of water. It can also be something as simple as coming in on a rainy day and having somebody put a wet umbrella or wet mail down or something like that on a piece. And that can cause that in inclement weather, sometimes with a crowded room of visitors that can happen just from the people coming in wet. Another thing that we get asked often and I think is an interesting concept to pursue is to consider minimally intrusive upholstery treatments for re-upholstering objects. So if you're going to the length that there's a reinterpretation or redoing of upholstery in a collection, work with your conservator to develop the concept is this a candidate for a non-intrusive or minimally intrusive upholstery treatment? Because it's surprising the amount of wear and tear on the interior surfaces that happen with upholstery interventions and a knowledgeable conservator can really go to great lengths to mitigate that damage with a re-upholstery by some simple techniques such as additive rails, nailing surfaces, tacking strips. And that can really help. And I'll go into these polishes now, or no, sorry. It's also surprising and this is, I illustrate this, this is kind of an obvious thing. But it's surprising how many times, especially in small library collections or small house museums, is that they'll have a docent or somebody on staff or a friend that wants to tighten up a piece or fix a chair and kind of uses inappropriate methods. We were just called into a library to look at some furniture that was donated by a patron. It was good historical furniture. And because they lacked the budget to call in a conservator, somebody, you know, well-meaning individual tried to strengthen up the chairs and drove all these sheetrock screws into the backs of chairs. And then as that system failed inevitably as it was going to, they called us in as conservators. And at that point, it was kind of too late. Whereas if we probably had been called in earlier, maybe we could have offered a simpler and less intrusive invention. So at this stage, I'll go into a little bit of care and maintenance tips, very practical, easy things you can do. Okay, so basic housekeeping. Things need to be dusted. And we find it best to use clean white cotton cloths and sometimes soft artist brushes. If you're going to use soft artist brushles that have metal ferrules on them, it's often a good idea to just put some blue tape around them just so that they won't scratch anything. We want to avoid, again, what we call friable surfaces, which are things that are either flaking or unstable, varnishes that aren't well adhered. Waxing once a year on well-varnished furniture, meaning that it has a good, clear and obvious varnish on it is okay. I'll talk a little bit later in the next slide about what waxes and things we recommend. And then again, earlier slide, I considered this idea of implementing a removable coatings program for your metal hardware. And that goes for brass, as well as other metals. And you can consult with a conservator about that. But it's very effective maintenance issue that it's hard to initiate once, but once you get it done, it's well worth it. The select waxes that we use are really just natural paced furniture waxes as our first go-to source. If you're going to use a product, make sure that it's as natural paced beeswax as possible. There's also microcrystalline renaissance wax. I think the main issue that could potentially be a conservation issue with natural beeswax polishes is that they do have a slightly high pH, but they're really pretty neutral. So if pH is at any concern, especially on metals, it's okay to use the renaissance wax, but I would just avoid waxes that have a heavy tiling component like briwax and things like that. You want to stick with the most basic wax you can. And I think you'll be safe. And the waxes that we recommend are on your handout list as well. Now, this is an off and a subject. There are many products that people will pull out when they're explaining to us their maintenance techniques. And this really goes probably more for private clients, but certainly it does happen in well-intentioned house cleaning for museums occasionally, is that people will use things like old English polish, Murphy's oil soap, various sprays, and they're really in various ways problematic. Anything that contains oils like the old English in the middle has a non-drying oil component, which I think the concept is that it's initially very gratifying because it alters the sheen of the piece and seems to saturate it, but inevitably because it's a non-drying oil, it will attract dust and moisture, and it will also seep into micro-fissures in the varnish or the finish that can cause problems and staining in the underlying wood over time. And it just really is kind of a nightmare, especially over many years. The old English is the same way. It contains rosin and some heavily pigmented, pigments in it that basically obscure a finish over time. And as it builds up, it just kind of gets this sort of opaque-ness to the surface that is really problematic. And then on the right, that panel new is kind of one of those products that's a spray product. And those are mostly problematic because they often contain silicones. And silicones are notoriously difficult, especially when you're doing retouching or re-varnishing a piece because they cause adhesion issues down the road. And it shows up as a thing called fisheye on surfaces. And so that is very, of all of them, probably the most problematic. And it is very surprising how much at one point or another in an object's life that has been used. That goes for like pledge and things like that. So probably the most basic thing that we recommend is just straight old-fashioned beeswax polish. That, for the most part, is safe on almost anything. If you do have a question, certainly consult a conservator, but that's generally safe. Another thing that, here's a little tip here, is recognizing easy fixes that one could do on their own. This is a very common thing is that everybody has a small parts drawer with little bits and pieces that have popped off an object. And if you catch it early enough, it's surprising how many times they fit directly back in. And if that's the case where you can clearly see that this is just an easy little piece to stick back on, the next question is, well, what do we put it on with? And here's something that you can do right in, very easily, is you can purchase fish glue. Now, Lee Valley sells these large containers of one liter. You certainly wouldn't use that in a lifetime if you were just doing occasional work. So we sell at Fallon and Wilkinson, which is, again, on your handouts. We have a small online store for some supplies. And we sell very small containers of the high-tech fish glue. And the reason this is very good to use is that it has a very high initial tack so you can immediately stick something back on with minimal clamping often needed. It is liquid at room temperature so it can be stored in a dark and cool environment. It doesn't have to be refrigerated. It doesn't have to be heated to be used. It just stays liquid at room temperature. It has a very long, excuse me, a very long up to one and a half year shelf life. And it doesn't smell. It's fish glue, but it doesn't smell. And the beauty of it all is that as conservators, it is continuously reversible in water. So you can always retreat it. And that's the big buzzword in conservation is retreatability and reversibility. And it has both of those things. So it's very good to keep on hand. You can keep a small container of it in the storeroom. And when you do get that little piece, see how we've put it back on. And we tape it on with very low-tack painter's tape. You wanna test that because that can pull off finish. But in the right well-adhered varnish thing, one could tape it on. And on the right, you have the piece back on. If that's not possible, what we recommend is take immediately upon finding it, label it in an envelope and put it in a drawer. And that way somebody in the future can know because it's surprising how many people will keep a box of parts somewhere in a different location in the building. And then if you're dealing with a whole collection, you have no idea where they go. And I think we'd rather see immediately that the piece get kept with the piece so that if it ever goes out for conservation or if someone's looking into it, it is immediately apparent where the piece is. So at the conclusion of this talk, we all know that wood began as a tree and was eventually fabricated into beautiful objects. I hope I've imparted on you some tips and things that you can do on your own and certainly have given you a resource to call on a conservator if you ever need to. And hopefully we've done that successfully. Many thanks to the AIC and the FAIC for all that they do. Gratitude to the entire team here at Fallon and Wilkinson LLC whose conservation is a group effort. Thanks to Rachel Perkins, Aaron Steen for inviting me to speak and for setting all this in motion. And thanks to Susan for keeping me on track and for all the hard work setting up this webinar. And thank you all. And now I see that there are lots and lots of questions and perhaps Susan can help me guide through. It occurs to me that I didn't answer them as we went. I think it would have taken way too long but I'm happy to do this now. And so we can do that. Thank you all. Is there a safe fix when the seats fall out of the chairs and couches? I don't want them to sit there. I just missed the beginning of it. Go ahead. Okay, in a historic house, is there any safe fix when the seats fall out of chairs and couches? I think that's a complex question. I think that there can be methods to prop things up. It's probably a complex enough subject that you would need on a case-by-case basis to consult with either an upholstery conservator or a wooden objects conservator. But I would say that there are ways we could do it. It just depends on the subject. Often you can prop things up underneath. There's right of ways, but it's hard to say offhand. Okay. This question is, I have a conservator's quote for an oil painting from 1994. Is there a rule of thumb for interpreting in today's dollars? And then someone said, I would get a new quote. Do you have any? Two things come to mind. I mean, certainly our own fees in my studio have certainly increased since 1994. Yeah, that's what it says. And the other big thing is that, I think it's gonna be obvious that fees have gone up. But number two, I think more important is the condition of the object could have well changed. That's an awful long time. And I would say all bets are off at that point and you need a new quote. Yeah. Do you think I would share the quote? I would share the quote with the conservator though because it may help get a leg up on what we're dealing with, but I think you need a new quote. Yeah. Let me get back to it. When you were talking about what I did, there was a question that came in about shouldn't you state exactly which oak pine or poplar you've found or does it matter? Can you just say it's oak, pine, fall, or... Again, this is certainly out of my wheelhouse, but I think that what Randy would probably say to that is why do you need to know? And then he would be able to guide you as to what it would take to get that answer. It always has to go back to a reason. And yes, I think it's possible to tell things like it's white oak or red oak or red pine or southern yellow pine. Other times when it's harder, and on a case-by-case basis, it would just matter how important it was to be able to tell that. I do think it's a deeper look often to get that answer. Okay, we have a bunch of questions about humidification. Yeah. One is what options do you have for humidifications if you're dealing with historic rooms, i.e., a space where modern appliances would not be appropriate? Well, and that's where I showed that drum humidifier because those portable ones, especially if they're monitored by that digital hygrometer I showed was battery-powered. It didn't need electric, but you would need electric for your humidifier. But if you have an electric source, you can simply put that in an inconspicuous area and that's gonna get you a lot further along, especially in this sort of micro-climates that can be within rooms in a single place. And it's a lot more flexible than an integrated system, obviously. But that would be the answer is what size humidifier that's portable can you put in there and then how can you monitor it, keep an eye on it? Okay, there was a small discussion on what about taking a piece that's never been in a stable regulated environment and placing it into one? Can that have a negative effect on the piece? And there were several answers to that, but we'd like your answer. Well, I think that yes and no, I think that the pieces that I've seen that have undergone the most damage usually have lived in an unmitigated environment their entire lives or a great portion of the current life of the object. And then they're moved into a heated and cooled environment. More often it's the heated part of the environment that drives down the humidity and will crack the piece. So for example, something that lived in Europe or something that lived in England in a high humidity stone house and then came to a New York City apartment with steam heat in the middle of the winter and it just blows up the first winter. And that's an extreme case. That's where you'll have problems. Going from an unmitigated environment to a carefully controlled museum environment where you have stable humidity and you've alleviated the spikes and the drops, I think you're fine. Okay. We have one, what suggestions do you have for stabilizing historic home woods in our 1886 Victorian mansion as original slat shutters built into the window frames? From what I can tell, they haven't been seriously looked at for a long time. And you're talking about stabilizing the wood? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's a tough thing. I think that the first thing you want to look at is the coatings. If they are painted with exterior paint and it's flaking, we had a case not too long ago where we treated some historically important painted exterior doors that were flaking. And in that case, we recommended that some storm type doors were put on the outside. They were glass, so they didn't completely obscure the paint. And then we consolidated the paint on site using some consolidation methods and some heat tacking to kind of lay down the flaking paint. So that's from a coating standpoint, stabilizing. From the wood standpoint, I guess it would really depend on its current structural stability and is it rotted or not? If it's rotted, there are some wood consolidants that could be used. It doesn't matter what environment, if it's exterior and it's a harsh side of the house. There's a lot of factors in there, but effectively you're talking about coatings issues and consolidation of wood issues and what in that range can be done. And I think that would be a conservator question that would have to be looked at with a conservator. Okay, we have some questions about waxing and cleaning and I'm gonna give you the first one and then we're gonna move down through a couple and then we'll get back to them. So one is, is it best to clean furniture without any polishes? I know that pledge is frowned upon because of chemical reasons. Yes. Yeah, I think, again, if the surface is not friable and if the surface seems like it can accept it, just a slightly damp cloth sometimes. And what we personally use here is, again, on your sheets, on your handout sheet, we use these big boxes of washed white t-shirt rags. They come in 50 pound boxes and ours are cut so that they don't have the edges of the sleeves and the collars, but they're essentially white t-shirt soft cotton cloths and we will often clean with those very lightly damp cloth to get dust off sometimes. Some of the microfiber cloths and the sort of, not so much the feather dusters, but there are a couple of products that are okay but they so vary these days in their manufacture and they're such a moving target because they're always changing. I never really recommend any one. I think it's on a case-by-case basis but I would say that you want smooth surfaces and you want as little chemical impregnation in that surface as possible. I don't like things that have oil or stuff sticks to them or any of these fancy chemical treatments. I think it's better. The most basic thing is just a white t-shirt rag. Okay, this is going back to the RH. One of the recommendations is if you move something into a museum stable environment, maybe you should acclimate it gradually so it doesn't have one last big fluctuation. What do you think about that? Again, I don't think, I don't know if that's going to make an enormous amount of difference. The only thing that would come to mind is that in the case of a high humidity event and I think of one case where there was a furnace burst in a home, an historic house and effectively it waned water on the pieces and completely waterlogged them and while the place was closed for the winter and then they froze. And so they essentially came into the studio for treatment completely waterlogged. In that case, a conservator will go to great lengths to slowly, very, very, very slowly dry the piece out, not do it fast. And so that would be one case where acclimation was part of the process but that was an extreme event. If you're talking about just bringing the piece in from another house or the trade or auction or whatever and it's looking fairly stable, I don't think in a well-regulated museum environment you're gonna have too much problem. Here we have, and we're gonna later talk about Murphy's Oil but this says Murphy's Oil, yay or nay? Nay. Murphy's Oil has a very problematic pH and if you read the bottle, it has a dilution ratio that it recommends and what happens is often people will make it too strong and that pH issue will soften and degrade varnishes of various types. A common symptom of that degradation is on things like interior handrails where we're backs of chairs where you touch them and they feel sticky and it's because oftentimes people will continuously over many years clean with the solution of too strong Murphy's Oil soap and the varnish undergoes a process called suponification where the pH changes the nature of the surface and makes it a little more prone to be water soluble and then it becomes sticky as it gets hand oils and things like that embedded into it. So I in general make a practice to just avoid Murphy's Oil soap for any cleaning related to wooden objects. Okay, we have a question about microfiber dust claws microfiber dust claws like dust bunnies or ZYs. Yeah, and again, like those, I think you just have to use your own look at them and your gut feeling. I just would say that if they're soft and they're as least chemically charged with fancy, there are some things that are impregnated with things that I would avoid but if you feel like it's just simply a soft, fancy duster that has no abrasion ability, I think it's fine. When in doubt, just go for the simplest thing. You need to make sure you keep them clean. Yes, exactly right because that's a good point because if you overuse it, the embedded grime that's in it is very abrasive. And so, again, that's why we just tend to use these white T-shirt clocks and we've always had those and they kind of work fine, you know? There was also a kind of a brief discussion about appropriate oils for cleaning linseed oil and Nicholas Schreferin said, I use olive oil in my home. Do you have any? And that's to clean what? To clean wood. Oh, I would say olive oil wouldn't be my first choice because olive oil, again, is a non-drying oil. If you showed me a piece that, perhaps a craft piece of some kind that had originally been oiled, there are some things one could put on it but just in general as a broad, topical application, I would say no, I wouldn't use olive oil.  You need to discern between saturation of the surface visually and what's going on with your humidification and all the environment and what the visual presentation surface is supposed to look like. But, and when in doubt, you know, you could always shoot one of us an email here but in general, I wouldn't, with the linseed oil surface, I wouldn't put new oil on it without really knowing what's going on. And there was a question about how would you remove stickers from wood surfaces? Oh, well, if you have a wood surface that is, again, it's well adhered, the finish on it and it doesn't appear friable, you can test an area but often a little bit of naphtha or a little bit of odorless mineral spirits can take a little bit of polished residue off. They're often soluble in those non-polar solvents like that. So our rule of thumb is naphtha and or mineral spirits and that can take it off. Sometimes they're a little bit water soluble and if that's the case, you could experiment with, if you got a eight ounce glass of water with a couple of drops of dish detergent in it, I like to use Dawn dish detergent with just a drop in it. You might be able to clean it off with that if there's any water soluble component.  But those methods can successfully take off sticker residue. Okay. There's a question. Are Swiffer cloths without any scent safe to use for dusting? And then there's another related question that says, what do you recommend we replace microfiber cloths with? Well, I don't think, I don't wanna wholesale put microfiber cloth people out of business. I think they can be fine. I think that the Swiffer that I've seen, they can be quite good. I don't necessarily have a replacement for them. I think if you get with no additives on it, and I'm honestly not as familiar with the exact product they're talking about, but if it looks like it's okay and it's very soft and microfiber, it's probably fine. Yeah. What do you recommend to use care for seal on objects that are used for demonstrations like a spinning wheel? Well, I think that a good paste wax can go a long way towards doing that. Just burnishing up the surface. And I think that that can be a good way to go. If it gets into anything deeper than that, I think you'd have to consult with a conservator about, are you talking about that you want it protected from hand oils and more of a varnish, or if it's just like a spruce up maintenance thing, in which case I think wax would probably be my go-to source initially. Do you have any feedback on Goddard's cleaning supplies? Yeah, I think they did have a wonderful wax I used to use, but there was a time, not too long ago, where we ordered some, this was probably three years ago, and we started, because we used to use it and we hadn't in many years, I think it simply ran out in the studio. So we got some new Goddard's wax and it came in spray bottles and we felt it was convenient at the time because of its application on dining table tops, where it was kind of easy to spritz it. But as I started to use it, I got a little bit concerned about how, honestly, how well it worked. And I started looking into it and we actually consulted with the manufacturer and kind of dug into it a little bit and they finally admitted back to us that they had silicone in it. And so we completely stopped using it after that. The only one that I did use to use was they made a hard cake of marble wax, which was a wonderful little tin of product. I'm not certain if they still have that, but any of those furniture creams, polishes, waxes that I'm aware of would be suspect in my thinking. Do you have any recommendations for cleaning a hardwood floor that's varnished or and also when it's unvarnished? Well, I think that I like to go to, I've always looked at the website for water locks. It's W-A-T-E-R-L-O-X and they have this kind of linseed oil based floor finish that I've used on various things here. And they actually recommend just a little bit of damp rung out water on a soft mop with maybe a tiny bit of vinegar in the surface and no other cleaners, soaps, anything. And the reason that they say to use that is because if the floor ever does need another coat down the road of a finishing product, that will be the best way to ensure that you won't have future adhesion or delamination issues. So I've taken to do that in my own personal house, which are hardwood oak floors that have water locks on them. If it's a polyurethane, I think the same thing could apply and that's where I would start if it was me. And there's another question, what about bono products? Oh yeah, well, that's a pretty wide range of products and they have a lot of different things and I'm a semi-aware of them. I think that I don't know if they would be appropriate for historic house stuff or historic floors or anything of that nature. I would think of them more in terms of a contemporary house maintenance type thing. If you knew you had new oak floors that were polyurethane or something, I think they have some wonderful products actually and they make some great finishes if you're talking about new construction, but I don't know where their place would be in historic house in that range. Okay, what's the best way to remove a water stain, i.e. a light area from a dark piece of furniture? Okay, I'm just gonna repeat that, it's a water stain so it's a light thing on a dark piece of furniture? Yeah. Yeah, so the rule of thumb is that if it's a light mark and the piece has what you would describe as it's finished, I would say that there's a potential that that light mark is in the upper layers of whatever finishes on there and if it is a dark ring on the furniture, it often indicates that water or some liquid has penetrated through the finish and gotten into the wood and created a little bit of a chemical reaction and oxidized the surface. So those are the two most commonly seen issues. If it's a light ring and it is indeed hopefully the best case scenario where it's in the upper layers of the finish, a really quick little tip is that you can use a little tube of the most very basic white toothpaste and you can put a little bit of tiny toothpaste on a soft white cloth and sometimes you can buff that little ring out. Now you need to be careful but the micro abrasives that are inherent in the toothpaste can be a very effective way of reducing and making that ring less visible. There are parameters to that so you have to be careful but that isn't often a way to do it. If it is not working, it may be because the stain of the piece was activated by whatever liquid there was and the humidity around that ring actually removed when the paper was wiped or the piece was wiped off that you removed color in which case some retouching by a conservator would be necessary with some type of additive retouching media to replace that color. If it is a black ring and it's in the surface sometimes what we've been successful is using oxalic acid crystals which will bleach out the oxidation that's in the wood and but again, that gets into a much bigger can of worms and would probably have to be done by a conservator but those are the two sides of the coin in a very brief way. What's the best way to clean a filthy piece of furniture which has been stored in a granary for many years? Well, the first thing is to understand what you're dealing with underneath. Are you dealing with a varnished surface or a painted surface? How fragile is that surface? Oftentimes grime and grit are on the top surface and they sometimes can be gently vacuumed away with a very soft tipped vacuum.  After that, I might think of trying to test and see if something like naphtha or mineral spirits will not harm the surface and it cannot come away to take any oily residue that's on there. And then lastly, I might think of, is there any aqueous cleaning that can be done possibly modified by a little detergent to get something off? All of it keeping in mind not to ever be abrasive or mechanical with your scrubbing, but you may be able to sort of gently coax the grime and dirt off the thing, the object and see if you can recover it that way. We did that, we were a part of a process doing that with a 18th century period paneled room that was stored in a chicken coop for many years and came out and was basically had to be heavily cleaned, but it did contain, it was a painted, fairly well adhered painted surface on wood. And so that was the sort of method we used there. Okay, I wanna ask you a question, Ted, if I give you some of these final questions, will you write answers to them and I'll post them with the recording? Sure, would one be able to email them to me? Yeah, I'll send them to you. So we still have a few more questions and you heard what Ted said. Well, I'll post them with the recordings and that way we'll get everybody's questions answered. I'm gonna ask you one thing. You mentioned several products during your presentation. Is there a basic tool kit of blues cleaners that waxes that you would recommend having on hand? Well, I think that you certainly wanna have some waxes. You certainly wanna have the fish glue. You certainly wanna have very low tack tapes around. You wanna have, I like to have a variety of Ziploc type bags and some Japanese tissue to wrap things up and put them in bags. And I like to have sharpie magic markers to write a label on the outside of the bag what we're talking about. I like to have little string tags that I can put on keys and things of that nature on missing parts and so on that can be labeled. And certainly the soft t-shirt cloths. And after that, it really becomes, you know, how much gear do you need on a case-by-case basis? I would possibly direct you to our website which is listed in the handouts which does have some more in-depth products that you may benefit from. And I'm always glad to answer questions if someone wants to email. Okay, so we're gonna answer the rest of the questions by writing and I'll put them in with the recording. Please do the evaluation. And they're very important, we really use these. So thank you very much and we'll see you next month for Kara Friends and Framed Optics. Thank you all for attending today. Thank you, Ted. You're welcome, thank you. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Mike.