Leather shoes

In the course of my diploma thesis I have been confronted with the
task of reshaping two leather shoes (dating from around 300 to 700
AD) which were excavated at a burial site in Egypt at the end of the
19th century. The leather of both shoes is quite rigid and hard and
needs to become more supple before any reshaping can be done. So far
I have tried to carefully humidify the leather by keeping the shoes
in an environment with a slightly raised relative humidity (55%) for
some weeks but couldn't achieve any noticeable results. Since the
leather is very degraded in some parts (shrinkage temperatures as
low as 32 deg. C), with already shrunken and "gelatinised" spots, I
don't want to raise the RH any more.I would very much appreciate any
ideas on methods which would allow the leather to regain a certain
degree of flexibility without promoting further deterioration of the
material.

Hanna Grabner
Conservation Department
University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 19:38
                 Distributed: Monday, February 20, 2006
                       Message Id: cdl-19-38-019
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