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Part of Home archive shelving: line the wood or replace the unit
Home archive supplies get tested through two contained practice projects
Testing a fabric for colorfastness and preparing a mount board: two contained projects that teach you to test materials before trusting them with anything.
What to take away
- Both projects teach the same habittest the supply before it touches anything irreplaceable.
- A colorfastness test tells you how dyes react to water and detergent, and it is not foolproof.
- Backing fabric has to be washed before use, to remove sizing and detergent residue.
- Neither project involves an original object. That is deliberate.
Project one: test a fabric for colorfastness
This is the shortest useful laboratory exercise in the whole subject. The Canadian Conservation Institute's note on testing for colorfastness explains what it is for.
Washing a textile is irreversible and may cause irreparable damage. A colorfastness or washfastness test must always be performed before wet cleaning is considered, to determine how dyes react to water and detergent.
It is careful about how much the result proves. The test is not foolproof, and its outcome is one of many factors in deciding whether an item can be wet cleaned at all.
The wider instruction is the one to practice on. Backing fabrics, repair fabrics and threads used in treatment or mounting must also be tested for colorfastness, and backing and repair fabrics must be washed before use.
There is a preparation step people skip, and skipping it invalidates the test. Vacuum the textile first, so that loose dirt or fibers do not mask the result.
Practice on shop-bought fabric and on something of your own that you do not mind losing. The skill being learned is not the test; it is the habit of not trusting a material because it looks clean.
Project two: prepare a mount board properly
The second project is preparing the support a flat textile will eventually sit on. The Canadian Conservation Institute's note on mounting small, light, flat textiles covers the method. It starts with an exclusion worth respecting: if a textile is soiled or in poor condition it should not be mounted, and a qualified textile conservator should be consulted instead.
Mount Board Preparation Steps
- Choose cotton or cotton-polyester backing fabric
- Test colored fabric for washfastness
- Machine wash once with mild detergent
- Run two detergent-free rinse cycles
- Lay wet fabric flat, align warp and weft
- Roll with brayer and place edge weights
Its specification for the support is easy to follow. The support should be a few centimeters larger all round than the piece, which protects the edges and makes handling safer, with a wider margin needed for wider frames or where a window mat will be used.
The fabric preparation is the actual exercise. Choose a cotton or cotton-polyester backing fabric, and if it is colored, test it for washfastness, avoiding fabrics with fugitive dyes because moisture or accidental wetting could transfer color.
Machine wash it once with a mild commercial detergent, then run two complete detergent-free cycles to remove sizing and detergent residues. Lay the wet fabric on a flat smooth surface, align warp and weft threads at right angles, and roll it out with a brayer. Place weights around the edges to stop it distorting as it dries.
Three washes before the fabric is fit to touch anything. That is the lesson.
| Project | Test it teaches | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Colorfastness | Whether a dye moves in water | None, done on scrap |
| Mount preparation | Whether a supply is clean of residues | None, no original involved |
Keep the results
Both projects produce evidence, and evidence is only useful if it is kept. Tape the tested swatch to a card, write on it what the fabric was, where it came from, what it was tested with and on what date, and file it with your supply notes.
Record Keeping Checklist
- Tape tested swatch to a card
- Write fabric type and origin
- Note test method and date
- File with supply notes
- Label offcut of every batch
Do the same for the mount board. A labeled offcut of every batch you buy turns a cupboard of anonymous white boards into a record you can check, and it means the next test is a comparison rather than a fresh start.
Why these two
Neither produces anything you can hang on a wall, which is why they get skipped. What they produce is the reflex of testing a material before committing an object to it, and that reflex prevents more damage than any product on any supply list.
Our guide to supplies compared on price and upkeep covers what to buy, and the three display projects cover the equivalent exercises for framing and rolling.
