Environment
The chief cause for decay in textiles is almost always the environment in which they are stored. Light, temperature, and humidity can all contribute to a textile’s health or deterioration, depending on their intensity. Additionally, pests, chemicals, and pollutants may also cause damage to an antique fabric. Airborne chemicals, such as smog or cigarette smoke are also harmful to the textiles, and should be avoided if at all possible: high-efficiency air filters should be installed throughout the building to reduce the presence of airborne chemicals that may stain, discolor, or weaken fabrics.
Read more about this topic: Textile Preservation
Famous quotes containing the word environment:
“Maturity involves being honest and true to oneself, making decisions based on a conscious internal process, assuming responsibility for one’s decisions, having healthy relationships with others and developing one’s own true gifts. It involves thinking about one’s environment and deciding what one will and won’t accept.”
—Mary Pipher (20th century)
“Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs.... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others—into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one’s future.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)