Originally Posted by peaceandjoy
I'm looking into wood shelving, and am wondering: Is it safe to store fabric on wood shelves? Painted? Polyurethaned? Stained? Robin
The reason you don't want to have fabric in contact with wood or paper for long periods of time is because the acid in these materials will gradually leach out and degrade the fabric. If you have ever seen an old quilt that has been stored in a cedar chest for years, you will notice the brown staining along the folds where the fabric was in contact with the unsealed wood. That is acid damage.
Staining wood will not seal in the acid. Polyurethane does seal in the acid, so polyurethaned wood shelves would be fine. Formica shelves are fine too. If you are putting up shelving against a wood panel wall, you would need to make sure that the wood on the wall has been polyurethaned or painted too. (I'm pretty sure paint will seal acid in the wood.)
The paper side of freezer paper will have acid in it (paper is made from wood fibers), so to use this effectively fabric would have to be placed against the plasticized side of the freezer paper.
Anyone who has done scrapbooking may be familiar with "archival quality" paper. This is paper that has been treated so it no longer contains acid. Anyone storing a wedding dress wants to make sure that the tissue paper and box are archival quality; otherwise, when the dress is removed decades later, it may have the brown staining characteristic of acid damage.
HTH!
Mary