RL Fifield vacuuming samplers with a dental vacuum in the old Textile Conservation Lab, MFA Boston, 2001. Back in the early aughts, I was...

Oil painting on canvas, Thomas Bewick (1753-1828). Cherryburn, Northumberland, National Trust. NT 530359. In digging through the British...

Der Wöchentliche Pennsylvanische Staatsbote 9/17/1773. RL Fifield Photo. Library of Congress. Many of us choose some aspect of life to...

Ladies in nymph-like attire twirling and leaping through fields – sounds like the turn of the century pageantry movement to me. The...

Images of geisha and courtesans are often mislabeled. For those unfamiliar with subtleties in the styling and wear of kimono, obi, and...

The Accident in Lombard Street. Charles Wilson Peale. Winterthur Museum. 1962.88. A pie lays broken in the street, a distraught servant...

September and October have been full of professional commitments. For those readers not familiar with museum work, this is often the...

I spent July at a Research Fellowship at Winterthur Museum, Library, and Garden. This mainly meant identifying manuscripts and object...

My time here at Winterthur is wrapping up. I took yesterday to visit two incredible local institutions, the Friends Historical Library at...

RL Fifield. I attended the American Institute for Conservation’s Annual Meeting in Indianapolis at the end of May. The opening reception...

An embroidered apron at LACMA, similar in concept to those depicted in the Winterthur fraktur below. M.2007.211.131 I’m not a...

Read this great book on 18th century commerce in the backwoods of Virginia. Ann Smart Martin’s Buying into the World of Goods: Early...

Just barely. RL Fifield 2013. Dr. V. indulged my whim to visit the assemblage of historic trains at New York’s Grand Central Terminal...

A few samples of historically recreated printed textiles using modern materials. The folded squares at the front are handkerchiefs....

Stitchers inside Dewey Memorial Hall, Sheffield, Massachusetts. Sheffield resident Lisa R. and I met through Revolutionary War...

The New Yorker Photo Booth blog highlighted tattoed women and a book about them Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and...

I roll over this analogy in my mind as I work with my study of 1,000 runaway indentured and enslaved women and their 6,000 garments,...

RL Fifield, 2012. Last weekend, The Brigade of the American Revolution hosted an Authenticity Event at Don Carpentier’s Eastfield...

I predicted in this post from April that people would be hot to trot for Downton Abbey influenced costumes this Halloween. True to form,...

I was inspired by this salted paper print from the 1850s of people posing for a photograph on a Baltimore and Ohio engine. I thought...