Accessioned!

 I've been working on accessioning some t-shirts at the Athenaeum, and today I finally completed the accessioning process. It should have happened last week, but I came down with a nasty flu and had a week off.

I'd previously added catalogue tags to those items where it was possible to easily attach an acid free luggage tag, but that left the neoprene stubby holder, a baseball cap and a t-shirt.

I'd initially thought of adding a cotton cataloguing tag to the stubby holder, but settled for simply writing the number on the base of the object in artefact in classic cataloguing style.

That left a baseball cap and a t-shirt.

Fortunately we had some suitable unbleached cotton tape in our supplies box, so the first stage was to make the labels

using a Pigma archival quality brush pen.

Then I attached the two labels with cotton thread using a very simple stitch making them easy to remove if required

using black cotton thread. I could claim that I used black thread to make it clear how and where the labels were attached, but in truth black was the only colour that I had to hand.

(There's an argument that perhaps I should have used unbleached cotton or linen thread, but preservation quality threads are not readily available locally and it's possible to be too precious about things - after all the items are either polycotton or chemically dyed cotton and not sewn with archive quality thread.

It would of course be a different question if the items were delicate and genuinely old dating from either the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.)

The labels were folded over at the ends and then folded in half making a smaller and neater tag - something I thought would be important if the items ever ended up on display as it would be easier to hide the tag.

Strangely satisfied with the result and I've learned a lot along the way about the accessioning process for fabric and similar artefacts ...