Day 5: 19 January 2011

Shoes and Cake


Every month at least somebody gets a year older... so we get cake. A short cake break for January birthdays was exactly what I needed [and I think everybody else did too]. It also happened to be my birthday on the third of this wintery month as well as Andrea's. Delish.


But, we also worked for our cake today. 


I started my first true day of shoe inventory today. Venturing up to the third floor of CARC, I had to take the freight elevator. That thing must have been welded by some evil genius, it sounds like it is on the verge of exploding most of the time. 


The third floor currently houses the textile and clothing collections, all so fascinating and just beautiful [until you get to the polyester years], as well as [my] the shoe collection. 

These are my lovely drawers that protect [kind of] the museum's shoe collection. I started today with cabinet 167, drawer 4. There was a slight mix up and we started the day with cabinet 166, prepped the shoes, brought them to the lab, got ready to take their pictures and write descriptions... only to find them previously completed [an intern earlier last year jumped on the shoe train too]. So we went back upstairs and went on to the next, uncatalogued shoes. 

These are some of the shoes from cabinet 166, the offending "already catalogued" shoes and some of my favorites. I want to wear these... everyday. [Not ok]

These are just a few of the dresses in the clothing collection. So beautiful.

The wedding dress collection behind plastic [we are battling a terribly unfortunate moth problem, but it is on the mend]. 

Once again, the lovely shoes of cabinet 166. Whoops.

These were the right ones. Also a favorite of mine. Sea foam green lace-up  leather heels. My my. 

For each pair of shoes I measured the length, width and height and then wrote as detailed of a condition report as I could. Then I got to describe the shoes and photograph them. Pretty fun I have to say. 

All of this information was then entered into the database on the computer along with anything else we could figure out about the shoes from their file or from the internet. We found an old ad for one of the shoe companies in an old magazine from the 1920s. Very cool.

Tomorrow will be more shoes and more photos. I simply cannot wait.