ABSTRACT
This case study presents the analysis and treatment of a dress worn by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II as a baby, in 1927. The item, now held by Historic Royal Palaces, possessed multiple areas of structural damage consistent with the inherent vice of tin-weighted silk. Appropriate care for such items requires an understanding of provenance, history and particular properties, including the presence of historically common processing methods, such as weighting, which may result in an extremely fragile fabric. The dress was treated using a methodology that combined chemical analysis, microscopic examination and a bespoke stitch support treatment. This not only fulfilled the project objectives and curatorial brief, but also provided information which gives a wider understanding of the object and its history, thus contributing to the available documentation. It also demonstrated the value of inexpensive, widely available and minimally interventive analyses, and highlighted the importance of reconsidering conservation techniques in the light of new knowledge, to select the most appropriate methods of treatment. In this case, it allowed the examination of a long-established treatment method (stitching), to justify why this method, whilst not novel, represented the most appropriate method of addressing the problems in this vulnerable item.
