The Hats Are Done!

Today at the Marquette County Historical Society, we finished our hat project! After approximately 20-30 hours of work, all of the hats have been cleaned up and put into their new homes. Our final task today was to label and record the final hats, and then sort and box every last hat.

Once we had recorded all of the hats, we sorted them by color. We figured this would be an easy way to find hats for future use because if someone is looking up a particular hat in the book, they will easily be able to locate the hat based on color. After sorting, we stuffed the ones that needed stuffing with acid-free tissue paper, as well as lined the acid-free boxes with that paper, and the placed them inside. We tried to make sure there was only one layer of hats per box, but in some cases we needed to set one or two on top of the others. In the end, we had three boxes of black hats, two boxes of blue hats and of tan/beige hats, and one box each of red/orange/pink, white/off-white, brown, and floral.

Our second task of the day was preparing for a hat exhibit that will be displayed in the museum. We found 30 hats we wanted to display, and cleaned out a big glass display case. We decided to keep some of the old hat boxes that many were stored in, and will be putting them in the storage space under the glass case for when the hat display needs to be changed. The rest of the hats are currently being stored in a closet in the exhibit house.

After we finished, we cleaned up the space, threw out some hats in poor condition as well as the remaining hat boxes, and began gathering items for our next phase in the project: shoes! Hopefully we will be able to finish the shoe project tomorrow, as there aren't nearly as many shoes and we have the process all figured out. The only problem we will have is with storage, since we only have so many acid-free boxes and they need to be used for the clothing, we are going to settle for storing the shoes in the plastic bins they are currently stored in, although we will line them with acid-free paper. For the mean time, please enjoy some more hat photos: