Relaxing the Flowers

Helen Gombar, my friend Mary Beth's mother, started her career as a milliner.  She made beautiful hats; I have seen some of them.

To make beautiful hats, one needs the right materials, including hat blocks for shaping, display stands, and decorative elements such as feathers and flowers.

Helen had LOTS of each.  Display stands occur in profusion in the basement:  together they comprise a virtual forest of hat display ware.

Marlene Dietrich?

Hat Blocks (and Canned Goods)

Deco Hat Stand

Likewise, the hat blocks occur in large numbers.  When I gathered them up in one place earlier this year I lost count at 40.  Some are one solid piece of wood; others are sectioned so that they can be removed without disturbing the shape of the newly formed hat.  There are brims and crowns of every conceivable size and shape.  It is really something to see.

Today I came upon a box of silk flowers that had clearly been intended for hat decoration.  I had known of the box's existence, but haven't had much of a chance to do more than glance inside.  Because I have nothing better to do (HA!) I decided to bring them home and see about steaming them.

What a Mess!

The contents of the box were a mess.  If my calculations are correct they have been in the basement for twenty years, and some of the flowers probably date back much further.   The flowers, which are silk or velvet are crushed and bent.

I looked online.  Advice online includes using a hair dryer or steam from an iron.  I opted for the iron:  my iron throws LOTS of steam.


Only my iron seemed woefully inadequate when pitted against the huge pile of flowers, and there seemed to be an increasing chance that I would burn my fingers.

I got out the big soup pot, the colander, and a lid, set a bunch of water to boil, and then steamed the flowers.  Well, some of them, at least.

Those of you who are into Cyberpunk will perk up at these beautiful black flowers that unfolded in my steamer.  They are not perfect, many of them being more than fifty years old, but they are in better condition than you might expect.  The large black roses are a combination of velvet and organza, and have soft stems rather than the heavy gauge wire stems we see these days.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the biggest issue with these flowers is with the leaves, which have often come unglued after years of sitting in a box in a mostly but not always dry basement.  Steaming the flowers did not make this worse, as far as I can tell.

Some of the flowers, like the ones at the right, literally popped open with exposure to the steam.  There is some slight discoloration in the white flowers, but often it is so uniform that it's difficult to tell whether or not they were originally off white.  I have some ideas for whitening the flowers (NOT involving bleach, thank you very much!) and will experiment on those flowers I deem irredeemable.

The variety of flowers is staggering:  not only do are there roses, there are daisies, gladiolas, sweet peas, wisteria, peonies, and orange blossoms.  There are strings of tiny roses and bunches of asters and little velvet grapes.

I hope that I can recover some of these treasures.  So far I think it's gone pretty well, but I also think I did the "easy" ones first.

Next up...FEATHERS!