Endrei Walter szerk.: Textilipari Múzeum Évkönyve 8. 1995 (Budapest, 1995)
dr. Ágnes Balázsy: "A stitch in time saves nine" - ethical aspects of textile conservation
The most important rule of the ethics of methods is that a conservator must appreciate and preserve every information on culture, history, ethnography and/or religion provided by the object. The integrity of the artifact must be preserved and no completions without proofs of the original should be added. Conservation should be planned after a thoroughful examination of the object. The restorer must tend to apply reversible treatments. Application of chemicals which might be harmful to the object (and to the health of the conservator) as well as padding or storage materials releasing damaging vapours must be avoided. If completions are made, they should be identifiable by experts to avoid falsings. All steps of the restoration work should be documented. It happened to the field of conservation rather late that textiles have been handled as subjects of invaluable sources of historical information. Precious textiles, such as coronation mantles, chasubles, flags, and costumes had been mended from time to time according to the saying "a stitch in time saves nine". The aim of these mendings was usually further use of the piece. Although mending is far from being equal to conservation as we consider conservation today, it is often thank to these mendings that the textile preserved its original shape and structure. Textiles, like household fabrics, historic and ethnographic costumes were often subjects of aggressive cleaning according to the common hygienic customs even in museums. As cleaning is an irreversible process and removes many valuable information of the history of the textile, much more attention has been paid to this step of conservation in the last decades than before. The work of a textile conservator nowadays is determined by several ethical rules. The difficulty is caused by the fact that each textile object carries different information on the human culture, it is in an individual condition, and requires special treatments. One of the main ethical rule emphasised recently is that a conservator should preserve the 'integrity' of the object. Two decades ago, it was a common method to separate the different layers of a chasuble or a costume, clean and treat them separately, and reassemble the object again when all layers had been supported. This method provided an opportunity to the conservator to increase the chemical and physical stability of every component of the textile object. At the same time, the conservator removed original stitches when disassembling the piece and often got rid off the deteriorated original linings and
